Kilgore on Interference

This link will take you to a long and technical examination of CrossFit from the perspective of a long term S&C practitioner and PHD - interesting if, like me, you like that sort of thing.  The larger point is relevant to my "Answering a Coach" post (which has been viewed 2000+ times) from earlier this month in that it shows an example of an S&C professional that bothered to examine CrossFit and understand it.  Dr. Kilgore, thank you.
http://community.crossfit.com/article/removing-interference

FOD Whats? Heck No I Don't Want to Eat That

"Sue Shepherd says she never expected to become famous for taming cantankerous stomachs.

"The 38-year-old Australian dietitian invented a food regimen with a bizarre name in her early 20s to relieve symptoms of bloating and stomach cramps. It’s now being adopted internationally, changing the way doctors manage a set of digestive troubles known as irritable bowel syndrome."

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-28/taming-stomachs-with-fodmap-diet-spurs-8-billion-market.html

I'd heard of the term "FODMAPS" from Chris Kresser, but hadn't followed up at all, so I found this explanation interesting.  The sample diet the posted was interesting but raised many questions.  

I think this is a telling statement:
"Because it avoids foods with high-fructose corn-syrup, it can be difficult to procure appropriate products in the U.S. where the ingredient is widespread, he said, in everything from jelly to ketchup."
In other words, if you eat stuff in packages with labels, you are eating food with FODMAPS.  
So here's the BLUF:  if you eat according to the Paleo template (meat, vegetables, nuts and seeds, little fruit or starch, no sugar no wheat) you will have eliminated most FODMAPS anyway, and several other problematic foods that the FODMAP diet seems to include.  To me, then, this diet is an explanation for one of the reasons why the paleo template serves us so well.

Meaning - you'll feel better, which is the point, and one I probably should make more often. Losing fat is great, being healthy is great, not being embarrassed or limited by a "beer tumor" is great, but the point of any of it is that your best life starts when your pursuit of what makes your life great is not limited by the side effects of eating nasty "foods".

Otherwise stated - it is easy for us paleolithic types, stuck in a neolithic society for which we are not optimized in many ways, to fixate on gaining pleasure from food by eating sweets, wheat, alcohol and other treats which we become addicted to (in greater or lesser degrees).  This is self evidently not the best way to have a fulfilling, satisfying, or exciting life, and for many, boils down to bare existence.  The trick is to eat such that, unhindered by health or energy deprivations, you can fill your life with activities and relationships that fulfill you.  

One of the characteristics of a "good diet" then, is that it does not require your effort and attention day and night to sustain it for years, or to sustain it when not in your normal routine.

At least, that's the way I see it.  

Here are a few more tidbits from the FODMAP article.  The story is another nail in the "more fiber is better" bandwagon, and generally aligns with the observations of the paleo template, but I found the story interesting in and of itself:

“I pieced together what was an experimental diet,” said Shepherd, who began teaching the regimen in her private dietetics practice in early 1997. “I wasn’t randomly picking these foods -- they all had something in common: they were all potentially not absorbed in the small intestine.”

"Peter Gibson, gastroenterology professor at Melbourne’s Monash University, helped coin the term Fodmap to describe the molecules people with irritable bowel syndrome have difficulty stomaching -- fermentable oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides and polyols found in dozens of everyday things from apples and wheat to milk, high-fructose corn syrup, and sugarless chewing gum."

"Shepherd, who has celiac disease, tested her diet on 25 people, preparing all their meals herself for 22 weeks in a study that formed part of a PhD thesis at Monash. She found the diet quelled symptoms in at least 70 percent of participants, compared with 12 percent given a placebo meal resembling typical Australian fare."

“Usual diets here in the U.S. are laden with Fodmaps,” Portland dietitian Catsos said. “Doctors have pushed high-fiber diets and fiber supplements almost across the board for IBS patients. Therefore, health-conscious Americans are guzzling smoothies filled with yogurt and fruit, juicing, eating loads of cruciferous vegetables, beans and high-fiber nutrition bars and nuts, then they wonder why their IBS has gotten worse.”

Lustig, Sugar, Controversy

"Let me tell you what's happening. You're not a glutton. You're not a sloth. But if you eat a lot of carbohydrate or drink those sweetened drinks, the sugar makes your insulin shoot up. You know that ring around your neck? It means your body has chronically high insulin. That's not good. Insulin steals the energy from your blood and puts it into your fat. Say you eat 1,000 calories. Your insulin grabs 500 of those calories and stores them in your fat tissue. And guess what? You're still hungry and you feel tired."
http://www.psmag.com/health/robert-lustig-sugar-obesity-diet-50948/

Here's a guy who's so right, and so wrong:

"All health debacles were originally categorized as personal travails before they were declared public health issues," Lustig writes in FatChance. "What if our breakfast cereal was laced with heroin by some unscrupulous food company?" Whose fault would it be if people became addicted? "Isn't it the role of the government to protect us?" 

Lustig, and many Americans, don't make the basic connection that government is characterized by ineffectiveness, largely because government only has one tool - force backed by violence.  

Our government, in its zeal to protect us is killing us by advocating a diet that was not supported by science (high carb, high industrial seed oil, and until recently, high sugar).  In short (and I blog at length about government and liberty on my other blog, Apolloswabbie) when "we" allow governments to have the power requisite to "protect" us in the way that Lustig imagines, we ignore a fundamental reality - governments serve the politicians that run them, and their political aspirations, and sometimes by accident do us favors as well.  As Thomas Jefferson stated so eloquently, "The government that governs least governs best."

Back to the part that Lustig is right about: 

The event that sparked his insight: "In 1995, when Lustig was a pediatric endocrinology attending physician at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, a group of children with brain tumors set him on his career course. Lustig noticed that, after neurosurgery to remove the tumors, the children showed signs of hypothalamic obesity. Their hypothalamuses were damaged, and as a result their bodies started producing too much insulin. All became lethargic and fat. Then Lustig prescribed octreotide, a drug that blocks insulin. With no counseling or any effort at behavior modification, all of the children started eating less, moving more, and losing weight. According to Lustig, elated parents started calling him, saying, "I got my kid back!" 

A follow-up study, in 1998, showed that insulin suppression using the same medication caused weight loss in 20 percent of obese adults. Lustig concluded that adiposity-fatness-must stem from a hormonal problem, not a behavioral one. In other words, fat people eat too much and gain excess weight because chemical imbalances make them hungrier and lazier than they should be. These hormonal imbalances cause the behavior, not the other way around. So if you want to fix the behavior, you have to fix the biochemistry."

I think Lustig casting his eye towards government to "make it right" is ironic - he'll have far more success, far faster, using his knowledge to help the people directly. When half the population has figured out that sugar and fructose and these other beasts of "civilization" are killing us, government will come along for the ride.

Leptin, Low Carb, and Alzheimer's

Abstract 

Accumulation of amyloid-β (Aβ) is a key event mediating the cognitive deficits in Alzheimer's disease (AD) as Aβ promotes synaptic dysfunction and triggers neuronal death. Recent evidence has linked the hormone leptin to AD as leptin levels are markedly attenuated in AD patients. Leptin is also a potential cognitive enhancer as it facilitates the cellular events underlying hippocampal learning and memory. Here we show that leptin prevents the detrimental effects of Aβ_1–42 on hippocampal long-term potentiation. Moreover leptin inhibits Aβ_1–42-driven facilitation of long-term depression and internalization of the 2-amino-3-(5-methyl-3-oxo-1,2- oxazol-4-yl) propanoic acid (AMPA) receptor subunit, GluR1, via activation of PI3-kinase. Leptin also protects cortical neurons from Aβ_1–42-induced cell death by a signal transducer and activator of transcription-3 (STAT-3)-dependent mechanism. Furthermore, leptin inhibits Aβ_1–42-mediated upregulation of endophilin I and phosphorylated tau in vitro, whereas cortical levels of endophilin I and phosphorylated tau are enhanced in leptin-insensitive Zucker fa/fa rats. Thus leptin benefits the functional characteristics and viability of neurons that degenerate in AD. These novel findings establish that the leptin system is an important therapeutic target in neurodegenerative conditions.

http://www.neurobiologyofaging.org/article/S0197-4580(12)00425-3/abstract

I doubt the author's conclusion will lead anywhere.  It is well established that high levels of triglycerides  prevent leptin from crossing the blood brain barrier.  My conjecture - and admittedly this is way over my head but a plausible conjecture none the less - is that this is one of the ways that high carb diets negatively impact development of "AD".
First, high carb diets drive high triglyceride levels, and with subsequent development of insulin resistance, high insulin levels.  The high trigs mean that less leptin will interact in the brain, perhaps creating the effects described above which drive amyloid-B accumulation at faster rates.
High insulin levels means that the body's scavenger system for amyloid-B, insulin degrading enzyme, is busy with insulin and never has time to attend to amyloid-B.
Third, fasting results in the body finding and using as much protein in the body as possible, and there's some evidence that this "protein scavenging" reduces build of of AGEs (a protein damaged by glycation) and other "junk" proteins that wind up in the plaques associated with AD.
Lastly, high blood sugar levels drives higher levels of advanced glycation end products, which are also accelerants in the plaques that characterize AD.

The example of the diabetics is telling - they get AD at higher rates than everyone else.  It would be interesting to know - can AD develop in a person who maintains normal to low blood glucose across their entire lifespan?  Or, the same question stated differently:  has a person ever been diagnosed with AD who maintained optimal blood sugar levels across a lifetime (or most of a lifetime)?

Milestone

Fire of the Gods passed the milestone of 100,000 page views last week - which is cool, although I know of affiliates in large CrossFit markets that hit 100,000 their first month!  Hope some of you are enjoying this, folks, I am.

Hero WOD: Sean

"Sean"

Ten rounds for time of:
11 Chest to bar pull-ups
75 pound Front squat, 22 reps

U.S. Army Staff Sergeant Sean M. Flannery, 29, of Wyomissing, Pennsylvania, assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 502nd Infantry Regiment, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault), based in Fort Campbell, Kentucky, was killed on November 22, 2010, in Kandahar province, Afghanistan, when insurgents attacked his unit with an improvised explosive device. He is survived by his fiancee Christina Martin, mother Charlene Flannery, and brothers Sergeant Brian Flannery and Devin Flannery.

Warrior!

50 L Pullups, Post-IED = BADASS!