Classic Quote, Tate

"If you are over flexible in a strength sport it could do you more harm that good, but if your flexibility becomes less than what is optimal for the sport, you will be looking at shoulders, hips, pecs, elbow and low back injuries." - Dave Tate
CEO EliteFTS

Dave Tate saying this does not make it true, what makes it true is how true it is. 

Correlation and Causation

Because good science on humans is so hard to do well, we still rely too much on corellation.  The most compelling narrative to be found is scary and simple:  the majority of the diseases of the West are not present in paleolithic cultures; if they are, they are found in much lower numbers.  This has been known for many years, but is only recently being used as a framework to understand what makes humans sick.  What do we do now that we didn't do before the advent of agriculture?  There are many, many factors, and there's no clear cut proof of what the ancestors ate, but the "paleolithic model" is a better far more useful framework than the absurdity on display by the "correlation is causation" crowd, as described below:

..it's no surprise that the relationship between diet and cancer is still largely a matter of educated guesswork--and in many cases, the guesses have turned out to be wrong. Take the much publicized link between high-fat diets and breast cancer, for example. Women who live in Western countries, where high-fat diets are the norm, tend to have high breast-cancer rates. Even more telling: women of Japanese ancestry who live in the U.S. get the disease six times more often than their grandmothers and great-grandmothers in Japan. Yet a huge recent study of 90,000 women has refuted the breast cancer-fat link. Fat has also been suggested as a trigger for colon, prostate and bladder cancers--but there's no hard evidence that cutting fat will reduce your risk for any of these diseases.
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,991543,00.html#ixzz1WRuJ0sQF

This is a significant document from a medical doctor documenting the progression of Western disease (but at $85, I won't be buying that soon):  http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1405197714/ref=s9_simh_gw_p14_d1_g14_i1?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-2&pf_rd_r=0QSCMCGM5F7TSVD291SJ&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=470938631&pf_rd_i=507846

"That Stuff Will Kill You"

His initial question — which he first posed in a 1999 study — was simple: Why do some people who consume the same amount of food as others gain more weight? After assessing how much food each of his subjects needed to maintain their current weight, Dr. Levine then began to ply them with an extra 1,000 calories per day. Sure enough, some of his subjects packed on the pounds, while others gained little to no weight.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/magazine/mag-17sitting-t.html?_r=1

Another cut:
The people who didn’t gain weight were unconsciously moving around more,” Dr. Jensen says. They hadn’t started exercising more — that was prohibited by the study. Their bodies simply responded naturally by making more little movements than they had before the overfeeding began, like taking the stairs, trotting down the hall to the office water cooler, bustling about with chores at home or simply fidgeting. On average, the subjects who gained weight sat two hours more per day than those who hadn’t.

The heart of the matter:
Over a lifetime, the unhealthful effects of sitting add up. Alpa Patel, an epidemiologist at the American Cancer Society, tracked the health of 123,000 Americans between 1992 and 2006. The men in the study who spent six hours or more per day of their leisure time sitting had an overall death rate that was about 20 percent higher than the men who sat for three hours or less. The death rate for women who sat for more than six hours a day was about 40 percent higher. Patel estimates that on average, people who sit too much shave a few years off of their lives.

All of these observations of correlation beg the same question:  Why? 

If you are a long time reader of this blog, you know my thoughts; what you eat impacts how much you move, and more specifically, how your body responds to what you eat impacts how much you move.  The mechanisms are complex and change over time for the same people, due to acruing damage from stress chronic stress, chronic inflammation from omega fat imbalances, lack of vitamins D, K and perhaps certain B vitamins, etc. 

Should you sit less?  Yes, if possible.  Is sitting really a new item on the list of "stuff that will kill you"?  That remains to be seen, because it is just as likely to be a symptom of what is killing you - metabolic derrangment - as it is to be a cause per se.

I hope they will be able to sort through the causality vice correlation issue, but they don't seem to be close right now.

Energy Balance, What Drives What?

Obesity and energy balance: is the tail wagging the dog?

J C K Wells and M Siervo

Abstract

The scientific study of obesity has been dominated throughout the twentieth century by the concept of energy balance. This conceptual approach, based on fundamental thermodynamic principles, states that energy cannot be destroyed, and can only be gained, lost or stored by an organism. Its application in obesity research has emphasised excessive appetite (gluttony), or insufficient physical activity (sloth), as the primary determinants of excess weight gain, reflected in current guidelines for obesity prevention and treatment. This model cannot explain why weight accumulates persistently rather than reaching a plateau, and underplays the effect of variability in dietary constituents on energy and intermediary metabolism. An alternative model emphasises the capacity of fructose and fructose-derived sweeteners (sucrose, high-fructose corn syrup) to perturb cellular metabolism via modification of the adenosine monophosphate (AMP)/adenosine triphosphate (ATP) ratio, activation of AMP kinase and compensatory mechanisms, which favour adipose tissue accretion and increased appetite while depressing physical activity. This conceptual model implicates chronic hyperinsulinaemia in the presence of a paradoxical state of ‘cellular starvation’ as a key driver of the metabolic modifications inducing chronic weight gain. We combine evidence from in vitro and in vivo experiments to formulate a perspective on obesity aetiology that emphasises metabolic flexibility and dietary composition rather than energy balance. Using this model, we question the direction of causation of reported associations between obesity and sleep duration or childhood growth. Our perspective generates new hypotheses, which can be tested to improve our understanding of the current obesity epidemic, and to identify novel strategies for prevention or treatment.

http://www.nature.com/ejcn/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ejcn2011132a.html

Meatheads on Calories

I love the influx of big brain writers, thinkers and practitioners in the fitness and nutrition industry.  Here's a great example:
Sorry big-box trainers and the equivalent ilk: the body obeys the 2^nd law of thermodynamics as it does the 1^st and therefore varies in efficiency based on activity, hormonal status and—by far the most important factor—the type of fuel we provide. That’s why Atwater, the father of the 4-4-9 calorie values for carbs, protein, and fat, respectively, distinguished between physical fuel values and physiological fuel values¹⁶.

In other words, the guy that identified calorie values by oxidizing macronutrients in a calorimeter knew from the beginning that there's always a difference in the potential energy in a fuel, and the actual energy delivered from a system after consumption.
The first, physical fuel values, is the amount of energy you can get out of food by burning it with oxygen, literally. You throw food in a fancy oven, incinerate then record the total amount of heat released—this is the physical fuel value.
The physiological value is the amount of energy the organism can derive from the fuel, which can be lower or higher. Fat, for example, depending on if the body is in a growth stage can get over 11 calories per gram out of fat^17-21. That’s significantly more than the 9 listed on candy bar wrappers.

This is a consistent result of measurement. Clearly, even a calorie of fat is not a calorie of fat.

The physical and physiological fuel values don’t match up for protein either. It takes energy to process the food we eat, energy that’s wasted as heat known as the thermic effect of feeding (TEF). When you eat a meal, you warm up. It’s that simple. There’s an extensive amount of research on the subject: about 2% of the ingested calories of fat, 7% of carbs and 30% of protein is wasted as heat whenever you eat²².
Let’s stop for a second. This is well established fact. There’s no disagreement in the scientific community, amongst pop-diet writers, not even among medical professionals. Knowing this, you can calculate the difference in physiological fuel values between two identical diets. If you took a diet that is 60% carbohydrates, swapped it around so that a much larger percentage of the calories came from protein, you could create two different 2000 calorie diets, one that’s high-carb providing 1850 physiological calories (considering all the heat lost) and one that’s low-carb providing about 1700 physiological calories (even more heat loss). By shuffling things around, we cut 150 usable calories per day while still putting 2000 calories into our mouths.

http://articles.elitefts.com/articles/nutrition/logic-does-not-apply-iii-a-calorie-is-a-calorie/

Just another way to give the lie to the well meaning simpletons who say "a calorie is a calorie", which is true but completely meaningless. 

Taubes Lecture

For the Taubes die hards, here's one of his later versions of his speech:

http://www.cphc.osu.edu/education/taubes/

WHS: Dairy - It's A Big Fat Issue

The text below from the link below offers the following very interesting analysis, which is rarely or never heard because it is exactly opposite of the USDA's "low fat milk is best" message.  How can the USDA keep publicizing scientifically questionable practices?  They say things that in one way or another comply with the wishes of the folks that have the most money so that in effect - no one can stop them.  This shouldn't be a surprise, as the idea of a monopoly being bad derives from the experience that monopoly need not respond to customer demand.  The USDA is of course a monopoly.

People who ate the most full-fat dairy had a 69% lower risk of cardiovascular death than those who ate the least. Otherwise stated, people who mostly avoided dairy or consumed low-fat dairy had more than three times the risk of dying of coronary heart disease or stroke than people who ate the most full-fat diary.

Contrary to popular belief, full-fat dairy, including milk, butter and cheese, has never been convincingly linked to cardiovascular disease. In fact, it has rather consistently been linked to a lower risk, particularly for stroke. What has been linked to cardiovascular disease is milk fat's replacement, margarine. In the Rotterdam study, high vitamin K2 intake was linked to a lower risk of fatal heart attack, aortic calcification and all-cause mortality. Most of the K2 came from full-fat cheese. In my opinion, artisanal cheese and butter made from pasture-fed milk are the ultimate dairy foods.

http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2010/04/full-fat-dairy-for-cardiovascular.html

Of course, these are quotes from observational studies, and can't prove causality - but they can show that other observational studies that "link" heart disease to high fat intake are as questionable as they've long been thought to be.

I don't know whether the USDA is influenced by industry, or bad science, or just incompetence.  I believe that no government agency should make recommendations without supporting intervention studies.