Maggie's Farm

The idea that government knows how we ought to eat is absurd. Many of us assume that government is stupid, but even your Mom doesn't know.

Nobody can say what a "healthy" nutrition plan is because humans and all higher primates are omnivorous. That means humans can thrive on almost anything as long as it contains sufficient calories to support life. I've seen enough kids grow big and strong enough to play varsity football on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on Wonder Bread to be convinced of that.

Yes, that "low fat" high carb advice was totally wrong, terrible advice for almost everybody. As was the "low salt" advice (for most people).  How Big Government Backed Bad Science and Made Americans Fat

Because of the ambiguity of being omnivorous, everybody has an opinion about what is best. "Clean diet," paleo diet, low-fat diet, high-fat diet, vegetarian diet, vegan diet, Mediterranian diet, bla bla bla.  My advice is to eat moderate amounts of everything. Small meals are best for health, fitness, energy, and mental clarity.

With a few comments:

- If overweight and if you do not want to be, cut the carbs and cut the volume. Don't be a pig. If fat and happy, that's fine with me because I am neither your doctor, parent, or spouse.
- If you exercise hard daily, especially with heavy weights, keep daily protein up to around 80-90 gms/day for adequate muscle repair, and eat some sugar - Coke, candy, fruit - before the workout.
- If you hate vegetables, take a multivit. If you think fruit is "healthy", show me the data. (There is none. Fruit is dessert or a quick sugar fix.)
- If you worry about overly-high bad triglycerides, discuss with your doctor. Bear in mind that elevated cholesterol does not appear to correlate with heart disease (except in diabetes and familial hypercholesterolemia).  Your doc knows that.

Since a study came out a few years ago, based on BMI, that heavy people live longer and healthier than thinner people, many heavy people applauded the news.

Of course, that study was nonsense. Overweight people are prone to countless ailments from arthritis to heart disease to breast cancer to Alzheimer's. BMI is not a crude measure, it is a useless measure. Just one of many reasons is that anybody with decent muscle development will come out as overweight on BMI.  It turned out that those "heavy but healthy" statistics were due to the number of well-developed individuals in the study which BMI rated as overweight.

In fact, it turns out that higher muscle mass correlates with reduced risk of illness and death. (Well, risk of death is 100% but they mean sooner rather than later.)

A meaningful gauge of being overweight for your build and fitness is your Body Fat percentage.  The simplest way to do this is to have somebody use the body fat caliper method on you. That does not measure intra-abdominal fat deposits, but it assumes a correlation. Your doctor's nurse knows how to do that. There are other ways too.  (An easier way is to study yourself naked in a mirror.) 

This site has two charts, one depicting "ideal" fat percentages based on fitness, and the second based on age. As an athletic female, I like to be around 25-30%. Seems disgusting for your body to be 30% lard, doesn't it?  It can be fine for a slender lady, though.

Just for fun, no ab exercises will give you 6-pack abs. Killer abs are all about fat. "Good abs" are visible in men at around 8% body fat, and in women around 12%. Those are either highly-athletic (ie well-beyond "fit" percentages) or otherwise verging on anorectic. I will not recommend any %s lower than those, even for models and ballet dancers, and, generally, feel that those %s are too low for regular fit people. 20% is fine for a regular fit male who plays sports and works out.

Below the fold, photos for comparison of men and women with varying body fat percentages. 

Since it was a bit of a hiking weekend, I decided to consider the topic from a health and fitness standpoint rather than from a fun and adventure standpoint. What I will say generally applies to all aerobic activities (ie rowing, biking, swimming, etc).

- First off, most articles we search discuss these topics in terms of weight loss and calorie-burning. That is nonsense. Unless you devote several hours/day to these things with a carb-restricted diet, they will do nothing for your fat. Let's take that off the table and accept that body fat is about nutritional choices and nothing else.

-  Second, we are talking about things which are often referred to as "cardio" fitness and cardio training. They really are not cardio training without the high heart rate which can not be attained for healthy people through walking or jogging. Similarly for skeletal muscle strength. For general endurance, good. True "cardio training" entails repeated anaerobic sprints of almost any activity (often termed HIIT. You can do HIIT with kettlebell swings, wall ball slams, road-sprints, sprint pool laps, or anything that stresses the heck out of you for 30-60 seconds). 15-20 minutes (including rests) of HIIT accomplishes far more for cardio fitness than an hour of aerobic activity.

Third, recreational hiking, jogging, swimming, biking, rowing are more the happy rewards of fitness than stimuli to increased fitness. I can hike 10 miles because I am somewhat fit, not to become fit. Nonetheless, they are the sorts of things that distinguish an "active" person from a "sedentary".  "Sedentary" roughly refers to a person with less than 8-10 hours/week of intentional, vigorous physical activity (not strolling, or housework or easy stuff), or less than 6 hours of high-intensity physical activity/week. A good measure of "high-intensity" is that you are short of breath most of the time.

- Except for newbies, the elderly, or the infirm, the above relatively low-intensity aerobic activities (I hesitate to term them "exercise" because they lack the high exertion component) are just fine for maintaining mobility and endurance for casual activities. They do not increase fitness once you can do them. Any healthy person can walk 10 miles, jog 3-5 miles, or swim a mile of laps. Still, aerobic endurance is a handy thing for life enjoyment.

- Walking and jogging put the same lower-body muscles to use. Both are easy on the hamstrings, which can lead to a muscle imbalance if jogging is your only activity. Anyway, these are not strength-builders or meaningful cardio training (because there is not a high-enough cardio stress once you have adapted to them).

- Jogging on cement or asphalt on a daily basis will come back to your joints at some point. For "long, slow", once/week is enough for a fit person who works out daily in other ways along with recreational physical activities such as sports. Running is speedy jogging with a long stride and sprinting is sprinting.

More on the topic below the fold - 

Magical thinking about food and nutrition is pervasive in wealthy parts of the world where nutrition is over-abundant and biological knowledge minimal. The classic example in the US is Whole Foods - organic non-GMO foods and supplements for the rich. A scam, like this one:

 Another Nail in the Coffin for Fish Oil 

The old idea of the virtue of a low-fat diet is in the dustbin of history. There is no correlation between dietary fats and heart disease. However, there is a high correlation between being overweight and heart disease - especially "pear-shape" (abdominal) fat. Indeed, being overweight or fat correlates with many diseases: heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, several cancers including breast cancer, arterial disease, joint ailments and arthritis, Alzheimer's - the list goes on and on. Humans were not designed for dietary abundance, but for caloric scarcity.

That is about dietary fat. If you are concerned about hyperlipidemia, let your doc treat it if it concerns you. There are many alternatives for that. 

To lose body fat, only a low carb diet works. Your body converts all carbs to sugar and then stores the excess sugar as fat. Dietary fat doesn't make people fat. Everybody knows what carbs are: sweets, fruits, dessert, root vegetables, juices, beer, grains, grain products eg pasta and bread, beans, corn, etc. The comfort foods.

To gain or maintain weight, eat plenty of everything including apple pie, ice cream, beer, Big Macs - and 70-100 gms of protein daily if you do heavy exercise (eg weights).   

Can you lose weight with an hour of daily exercise? It depends on the intensity of that hour, but it's not a realistic effect for most. Still, it is worth doing for countless other good reasons including mental well-being and energy. Intense exercise tends to reduce appetite, so there's that too.

Powerline's Scott Johnson got the memo.

Barbara Bush in failing health, won’t seek additional treatment

That's the right thing to do. It is unwise and inhumane to continue to treat people medically when it is clearly their time to go.

Rats can do it, but adult humans have no capacity for growing new brain nerve cells (neurons). The idea that humans could do that (with exercise, etc) has been a hot topic for over a decade.

From Adult Neurogenesis:

We know many scientific studies are false. But we usually find this out one-at-a-time. This – again, assuming the new study is true, which it might not be – is a massacre. It offers an unusually good chance for reflection.

And looking over the brutal aftermath, I’m struck by how prosocial a lot of the felled studies are. Neurogenesis shows you should exercise more! Neurogenesis shows antidepressants work! Neurogenesis shows we need more enriched environments! Neurogenesis proves growth mindset! I’m in favor of exercise and antidepressants and enriched environments, but this emphasizes how if we want to believe something, it will accrete a protective layer of positive studies whether it’s true or not.

I’m also struck by how many of the offending studies begin by repeating how dogmatic past neuroscientists were for not recognizing the existence of adult neurogenesis sooner... 

One might think that there is an epidemic of Alzheimer's deaths, and those who seek funding for Alzheimer's will tell you so.  The reality is that the rising deaths from Alzheimer's is a measure of medical success in dealing with the other ailments which have tended to kill people sooner than Alzheimer's.

We'll all die from something. Eventually something gives out, even the brain. Carpe diem, and try not to have a family history of Alzheimer's.

Whether scrawny or pudgy, challenging exercise makes a person more aware of his/her physique by pushing its limits. Yes, a good conditioning class is the best wake-up call for most people, but so is 3-5 minutes of jumping jacks or jump rope. 

The scrawny learn that they need to push themselves to build themselves up for strength and endurance, and the pudgy are forced to realize how much their pudge slows them down. Therefore they are motivated to pay more attention to their nutritional habits so they can keep up.

A physiological factor is that an hour of daily exertion tends to reduce appetite in pudgy adults. Exertion means "hard to do." Scrawny people may have to force-feed themselves somewhat.  Athletic and physically-active people tend to consume what they need, not so much what they want. 

So that is how an hour of daily cardio, calisthenics, and weights helps get people into fighting shape. The exertion itself is a minor factor but it is a motivator. Physical maintenance.

People looking for magic for fat loss and people looking for magic in muscle weight gain are often suckers for magic diets and magic elixirs. Steroids work for the latter, but it's a bad idea.

I have had enough success with patients who want fat loss over the past 12 months with Contrave to feel that it is worth a mention. It's a magic elixir of Wellbutrin and Naltrexone.  Both seem to have a measurable effect of reducing cravings of all sorts. No, it's not quite magic but it can reduce greed and take some of the burden from self-restraint.

I have posted in the past about how subjective hunger (aka "false hunger") is common in the overweight who have no caloric needs at all but who tend to desire more intake and to eat more avidly, more rapidly, than normal-weight people. It may have something to do with the loss of satiety signals, or ignoring them. Insulin sensitivity plays a role, for sure, and that is produced by poor or excessive eating habits. Psychological factors too. All we really know is that, if you are overweight and hungry, something is out of whack because you do not really need any food at all.

(As I have asserted in the past, exercise does nothing meaningful for fat loss. I'll make one exception to that: compulsive exercisers who work out for hours daily, but they usually are living on organic lettuce from Whole Foods too.  One other factor: for most people, heavy-duty cardio and weights do tend to reduce appetite. People in rigorous daily fitness programs therefore need to follow nutritional programs to make sure their intake is sufficient to support their efforts or they can risk losing muscle while their bodies are undergoing renovation. This only applies to body renovation projects, not maintenance)