Go Outside...Move

Paleo Skiing – And Using Endomondo For Alpine Ski Runs

2011-12-12T09:46:00.001-08:00

I had to use those two words together (Paleo + Skiing), as they probably have never been used in conjunction before, in printed text (well at least not in a headline). Since I have a paleoish lifestyle (real food + dairy, occasional fasting, resistance training for workouts), I can say that Paleo, particularly the lower-body weight work, is an excellent prep for alpine skiing.

I've been skiing the last three days at Sugarbush in Vermont. Although the weather's been spotty in terms of keeping snow on a big mountain, the run from the top of the mountain is very good, with great views of the Vermont woods and Champlain Valley. Everyone should come skiing to Sugarbush for the holidays; that means you Bostonians and New Yorkers.

I used Endomondo, which is a sports tracking "app" from Denmark, for alpine skiing. Endomondo (roughly translated: endorphin world) is a Global Positioning System (GPS)-enabled app that records everything you do sports-wise, then outputs the "runs" to a map. That could be seen as silly at first, since the visual on the map while skiing one top-to-bottom run looks like a circle redrawn over and over again, but the statistics are kind of interesting. The screen from Endomondo is reproduced here.

Apparently, I skied fairly conservatively, because I never hit faster than 22.7 mph. It also tallies up your vertical for the day (total amount of feet skied downhill for the day); I did 5,644 ft. for five recorded runs and one hour seventeen, which isn't bad. It shows how much vertical you can do in a full day of skiing.

Then you can export the workout from Endomondo as a GPX file (with a .gpx ending), and presto! you can open it up in Google Earth, which can be a more revealing view of the skiing path, particularly when you're on a big mountain that's fully open, including the woods. Google Earth also amasses the stats, and its calculations deviate somewhat from Endomondo (that's to be expected). GE gives me a little more vertical (5,800+) and speed: 24 mph.

You can use Endomondo to try to set your speed and vertical records for the year. At the very least, it's cool that you can generate these graphical displays by just letting an app run in your pocket!

Is Vitamin C 'The New Vitamin D'?

2011-09-27T05:46:00.000-07:00

The answer to the above question is probably "yes." Of course, you could probably say that about any vitamin or mineral; none of them are "less important" than another.

I interviewed Carol Johnston, a leading vitamin C researcher and a professor at Arizona State University, as part of research for a book I'm writing. She told me about some National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) data from 2004 that showed 31 percent of Americans to be either “scorbutic” (vitamin C blood levels indicating scurvy) or having “marginal vitamin C status” (meaning that “your body tissues are not operating optimally because there is too little of vitamin C there for optimal pathways and metabolism”).

She had me convinced; vitamin C is a wicked important, underappreciated nutrient. Scurvy is a potentially fatal disease (involving the disintegration of your collagen!), and while the vast majority of people are not getting scurvy, less alarming levels of deficiency cause fatigue, because you're not making enough carnitine.

Vitamin C must be present to produce collagen, the super-strong connective tissue protein in tendons, cartilage, bone, and blood vessels. However, collagen has an important immune-system role as well, according to Johnston.

“We have defense collagens, little toll-like receptors on immune cells that actually recognize pathogens,” Johnston explained. People who are deficient in vitamin C (up to a third of Americans) have a “marginalized ability to stay infection free.”

Vitamin C is also a cofactor for making carnitine, a pivotal protein that shuttles fatty acids into the cell’s mitochondria to be burned for energy. “A lot fatigue associated with early marginal C status could be related to carnitine [depletion],” Johnston said, because your metabolic system for using fats energy is compromised.

The fatigue “could [also] be related to norepinephrin,” she said. “No one’s really looked at that” from a scientific research standpoint. Vitamin C is necessary for the production of norepinephrine, which the adrenal glands release as part of the “flight or fight” response. It’s also a neurotransmitter that affects how the heart contracts.

The typical adult stores about 1,500 mg of vitamin C in their body, mostly in the liver and adrenal glands.

What about the mega doses some people shoot for, such as 40-50 times the RDA for C? “Vitamin C requires a transporter and you can saturate that pretty quickly,” Johnston explained. “When you start taking over 200-500 mg you are really decreasing the amount you can absorb. I don't see a lot of benefit in consuming those high doses if you want to maximize tissue storage. You really need to take small amounts over the course of a day.” For example, 200 mg two or three times per day – if you think you need that dose.

So make sure to chow your oranges, lemons, apples, tomatoes, broccoli (however that idea makes you wince); you need to keep the vitamin C stores up!

The picture, by the way, is of apples I picked yesterday for breakfast (about the extent of my own hunter-gathering). A handful of small apples off a tree are better than one big store-bought apple, because they tend to have less sugar, and you eat more skin, which increases the antioxidant amounts you are consuming.

Disc Golf is Awesome

2011-09-26T04:58:00.000-07:00

Disc golf is a healthy activity for reasons that seem to distinguish the difference between over-training type sports and more optimal ones. I urge anyone who has a park or mountainside with one of these courses to take part.

My son and I did the lower-mountain nine holes at Sugarbush in Vermont yesterday, two hours and a mile and a half distance between holes. You end up, however, greatly exceeding that distance, because you spend a lot of time scrambling around looking for your wayward disc.

The benefits are:

* You're outside in the sun the whole time, getting in a great hike in a playful, less grinding manner;

* You're not maxing out your heart rate at 80% or more with unhealthy "chronic cardio," because it's just a walking, playful, chatty activity.

* You have to make a lot of strong, random all-body movements, like climbing in and out of gullies, balancing on fallen tree runks, and heaving large tree branches. For example, my son's disc ended up stuck high up in a tree. To get the disc down, we found a birch branch about 30 feet long, carried it over to the tree, and then I kind of hoisted it straight up like a vertical spear to knock the disc down. Who needs weights!

* Not to hyper analyze everything but ... the latter activity did involve a lot of problem solving skills to engage you and your child's brain with something basic and natural; how do we get the disc down? How do we cross the stream? etc. Just going out and having a cardio mountain workout is mostly static, repetitive, and doesn't engage your wits.

Believe it or not, disc golf is probably more evolutionarily appropriate than just hiking or biking straight up a trail, and certainly superior to the video game I wrenched my son away from before we went to the mountain!

The Regrettable Abnormal: Pitching In After Natural Disasters

2011-09-07T09:28:00.000-07:00

I don't like the oft used expression "the new normal." It implies a kind of trendy complacency, as in "so we've screwed up our own biosphere, but what's done is done so let's just start calling it normal." Not only that, but the expression pretends to be strong and savvy about the true nature of the world: "be like me, just move on and get on with your life."

Just because some phenomena is happening more often than it used to, doesn't make it normal, thus acceptable and almost beside the point. That's about as sensible as viewing "high school kids plotting the wanton slaughter of teachers and fellow students with guns and bombs" as "the new normal."

I prefer the term, the "regrettable abnormal," as in Vermont having rainfalls and floods that are more typical of, as their governor pointed out, Costa Rica. We all had a taste of the regrettable abnormal in New England when Vermont took it on the chin from Irene. In just a few hours of violent rainfall and flooding, the home, property, and road damage throughout this small state was quite massive.

The only positive that has come out of this disaster is a groundswell of grassroots support from neighbors and out-of-staters to help the flooded towns. This is my round-about way of getting to the topic of reason number 49 for staying fit and strong from a muscular standpoint.

You never know, not only when you might need physical strength to save your own or someone's life, but when you may need it to help a traumatized fellow citizen.

I helped with a flooded home and property cleanup a few days ago. It was hard work. A lot of heavy shoveling, pulling, carrying buckets of mud, and pushing heavy wheelbarrows (not to mention heavy chainsawing, but I didn't have a chainsaw). It was hot, and you had to wear a mask.

Beyond the heartwarming inspiration of two dozen strangers showing up to help someone in need, along with the amazing ability of the property owner himself to bear up (he was about 70 years old), I was impressed with how fit and strong a lot of these helpers were. The message is: physical fitness is not selfish; it gives you another tool with which to help someone else.

Vermont's need for help is going to be ongoing for months. Locally, the Mad River Valley, you can contribute to http://www.mrvcommunityfund.org, and for volunteering visit: http://www.facebook.com/MRVpostIrene#!/MRVpostIrene or
http://www.facebook.com/MRVpostIrene?sk=events; or a statewide page: http://vtresponse.wordpress.com/.

By the way, this is off-topic but, the videos from the Ancestral Health conference are available here: http://vimeo.com/ancestralhealthsymposium/videos.

NY Times Story On Mount Rainier

2011-08-13T12:06:00.000-07:00

The New York Times has a story on the record snows lingering at Mount Rainier this Summer. At 5,400 feet, Paradise, where we started our climb on July 21, 2011, had more than 900 inches of snow this year (their average yearly snowfall of more than 600 inches is still a lot, by any ski area's standards)! Higher up on the mountain easily had 1,000+ inches.

We were hiking on snow 100 percent of the time, but there was no post-holing, no snow-shoes required, and it was mostly pleasant. The trails were frozen over higher up on the mountain, especially at night when we hiked to the summit. There have been some problems with snow bridges collapsing (always an event on glaciers), and that's why you don't hike over the heavily crevassed terrain when it's hot in the middle of a Summer day. This is when avalanche conditions can be bad too.

The weather was beautiful when we were there, as shown by the pictures. I guess we were lucky. The NY Times story is mostly referring to casual visitors to the park who want to do a bit of hiking above Paradise on the way to Camp Muir at 10,080 feet, but not all the way.

As for visitor numbers dropping off at the park, there was a giant migration of them coming up the mountain when I was sliding down.

It was fun glissading down at the end, when I could maneuver my backpack properly!

Subjective V. Objective Hazards, In The Mountains and Beyond

2011-08-01T11:39:00.001-07:00

I summited Mt. Rainier at 5:30 AM on July 23, as the sun was coming up on a perfect day. I'll provide pictures and a report soon, but first I'll mention an interesting element that was brought up by the Alpine Ascents guides. It is such a simple and useful concept, and has much broader applicability than climbing in the mountains.

They lectured us somewhat on subjective v. objective hazards. An objective hazard is a aspect of climbing that you largely cannot control, such as bad weather, a rock fall, a collapsing snow bridge over a crevasse; er, a volcano that erupts while you're climbing it.

I say "largely," because you certainly can reduce the chances of being hurt by an objective hazard, such as not climbing in threatening weather, or during later, warmer parts of the day when an avalanche-prone area might slide.

A subjective hazard is something that is your fault or avoidable: hiking too fast and with the wrong rope configuration (or unroped over crevasses); poor nutrition and hydration; lousy conditioning, climbing over your head; or something really simple like bad footwork, causing a slip in a steep area and a near disaster for your rope mates.

When the guides asked, "what's the most important topic we taught today," the answer wasn't self-arrest (a technique of jamming the point of an ice axe in the mountainside to halt a fall), it was proper footwork. Prevent the subjective hazard in the first place, and that's how you promote safety in the mountains.

I was reminded of a the broad applicability of this strategy when I ran into someone during my daily duties who was having major surgery to repair muscle and tendon tears in their ankle. I noticed that they were fairly over-weight, and it was a somewhat routine hop down from a fence that tore up their ankle. So they had failed to eliminate the subjective hazard, which was over-weight, and the result was a long-term and expensive accident.

Training For Mountain Climbing, Hiking, Treks

2011-07-10T06:59:00.000-07:00

I'll be going out West pretty soon for my Mt. Rainier climb, which at 14,411 ft. is attempted by thousands of people in the Pacific Northwest. I'm taking a sort of guided tour, in which there will be a training day on the snow slopes, an overnight in tents on a glacier, and a midnight summit climb. Rainier isn't very high as mountains go (its summit is about 3,000 feet of elevation beneath Everest's basecamp) but offers many other challenges, such as major glaciers and other features like seracs and crevasses, and more complicated weather than a place like Mt. Whitney in the Sierra Nevada, where the Summer offers so many beautiful 60 degree days on the summit.

So what is the best way to train for the climb? This is probably a more debatable topic than you think.

If you're starting from point zero in your conditioning, then clearly some moderate "cardio" training like running, cycling, or some gym machine is reasonable. You do have to train the body to diffuse oxygen efficiently throughout your muscles, heart, and brain.

However, if you begin with a good training base like me, I would mostly avoid traditional cardiovascular training. You're not going to be running and cycling on the mountain. You are going to be walking very slowly uphill carrying a pretty heavy load, so this is the kind of training you should be doing.

This is the concept of specificity, a fancy term for simulating the physical effort you will be making in training. Here are examples of training techniques for mountain climbing and hiking:

* Heavy pack hiking such as in the Green Mountains in VT;

* High and low intensity weight lifting, all body, including exercises that strengthen the lower back. Pullups are really good for the lower back.

* Walking with a weighted vest in the same boots you will use for the climb. These vests are really good workout tools anyway, because you can adjust the weight from 5 to 40 pounds, and do things like weighted push-ups and pull-ups. I just took my trekking poles out to a local trail in the suburbs while wearing the 40-lb. vest, and I think it was a pretty good resistance workout.

* Sprinting for short bursts, like Tabata sprints, which improves overall conditioning.

* Try to properly acclimatize before the climb, which is hard for us flatlanders but not impossible. An example is traveling to a higher altitude area like the Rockies before your climb. Sleep at 8,000 feet and do some light hiking at 9-10,000 or higher, for example.

Acclimatizing is *much* more important than putting in junk cardiovascular miles before a climb. You can be in great 10K shape but totally fall apart at 10,000 feet because your body doesn't have any adaptation to higher elevations.

The Don'ts

Don't overtrain and show up at the climb banged up or depleted. This is common of many big events like climbs or triathlons, because you are apprehensive and want to "make sure" of your training level. Believe me, I always feel the same thing. It's best to show up rested and let the chips fall where they may.

Don't deplete your muscles with excess cardio training. Running and cycling to excess will consume your own lean mass. The body will harvest your muscles for the protein that can be converted to glucose and energy. You *want* muscles for climbing, so you should be predominantly lifting weights and carrying heavy loads.

Hey, Enjoy the Trip

The key thing is to stay in the moment during your trip, and avoid the summit fever affliction. Many factors out of your control can prevent you from reaching the top, mainly weather, but there could be people in your group that get sick and have to be brought lower. The bottom line is, you're in a very unusual and sublime place on earth, so appreciate every moment!

Urban Fitness

2011-06-30T11:07:00.000-07:00

The assumption that big metropolises are unhealthier to live in than the country or suburbs is probably untrue. With the proliferation of ubiquitous franchise food off of most exit ramps and strips, and the general tendency to live out of cars and in front of TV and computer screens, I've grown to think of the suburbs as unhealthier. With their tree-lined streets and golf/ballfields and spacious subdivisions, the suburbs just look healthier, but in this case looks can be deceiving.

Of course, it depends on your personal style and attitude. If you're determined to be negligent, blase, and trendy-sickly about your health, then it doesn't matter where you live. But I wouldn't be so quick to write off the mega-cities, which progressively more people will live in, as toxic places.

I just returned from New York City. I graduated from NYU decades ago, so I have a lot of experience in both rural and uber-urban places. Like Boston, NYC is a very walkable city. In two and one-half days (during which I got to see the estimable Sigourney Weaver take part in a play reading in a part of Manhattan called TriBeCa), I probably walked 12+ miles. You just end up doing a ton of walking by default, because getting in and out of a car is a pain in the ass in the city, among other reasons.

They are also fascinating places where you just want to walk, everything open and inviting to the imagination, as one is spurred on by the pleasing chaos of their evolving designs and all the sensory stimulation.

My daughter and I found ourselves way downtown by the East River, not far from the WTC memorial site. There was a large, beautiful park area with a biking/walking/running path right on the water, not to mention the Irish Hunger Memorial, which we strolled through. There were tons of opportunities there to get more sun and exercise than you need. A nearby apartment even had a surf or paddle board propped up by the window.

I walked under the Queensborough Bridge around 60th Street in Midtown, and the structure had a separate lane for bikers and pedestrians. Long hillclimbs such as what I can get in Vermont are about the only thing missing for serious athletes in New York City. I have also heard about but did not see the other big spacious set-asides in the city for bikers and pedestrians where vehicles are not allowed.

Even Washington Square Park at my old NYU stomping ground had lots of slim "beach babes" getting their vitamin D on the grass, and far fewer crazies and drug dealers, with the more contemporary NYC style of having a more visible police force.

The suburbs and country, in fact, are beginning to lose their police presences because of funding problems. Now that can be unhealthy.

NYC has unlimited possibilities to find the most advanced gyms and cross-fit centers. And you walk or run to them. The suburbs usually require driving long distances, 10-20 miles or more, just to access the type of gym you want to maintain optimal levels of lean mass. Each day I was in New York I used the hotel gym, just a high-intensity 15-20 minutes or weight lifting before I started walking.

The downside of the mega-cities, among other population density issues, is the "noise pollution," which is hard to sleep through. I average over 8 hours per night of sleep at home, and I didn't come close to that in NYC. But that was also a measure of the fact that I was staying up later in the city that never sleeps, seeing theater, and eating later than I ever would. Living fulltime in a mega-city requires some adaptation and resistance of temptation to get optimal levels of sleep and avoid partying all the time.

I see far more obese people in the suburbs. The city, I think, requires just that much more "get up and go." The last point of comparison I would mention is that rural places, because of the opportunities they present, tend to condition people to overtrain and end up damaging themselves.

I love it and spend a lot of my time there, but the beautiful rural communities of northern New England are full of thriving orthopedic centers tending to and operating on the growing number of ageing enthusiasts who have ruined their joints on the wide open and challenging terrain.

Remember, the conventional wisdom on heavy endurance training being healthy is wrong. Toxic levels of exercise are, well, toxic. In this case, the trite expression "can't have too much of a good thing" is spot on.

When I was in NYC, I felt like I was doing just the right dose of exercise to trigger a positive adaptation, and no more.

Magnesium Methods: Try Swiss Chard, High Cacao Chocolate

2011-06-22T11:34:00.000-07:00

Minerals are the micronutrients that we need from the earth, like calcium, copper, iron, magnesium, and potassium. Plants derive these substances from their soil and we eat the plants, or we ingest minerals from animal and fish flesh; or we actually derive them from drinking water in an aquifer or stream.

Magnesium is an ultra important mineral to maintain adequate levels of in the body. It's a "macromineral" (one we need at least 100 mg of per day), like calcium and potassium. Magnesium is required by the chemical reactions that make ATP, our primary energy currency, in the mitochondria of cells, according to the Linus Pauling Institute. ATP, the metabolic fuel without which we would cease to function, is a molecular complex that includes magnesium.

The synthesis of glutathione, a natural antioxidant in the body, requires magnesium. Magnesium plays a structural role in bone, cell membranes, and chromosomes, according to LPI. And it goes on and on. Obviously, you have to get enough magnesium in your diet.

I'm not a fan of trying to get adequate nutrition via multivitamins/minerals. I just don't think "the delivery method" is adequate. Most of the documentation I read states that deriving micronutrients from whole-food matrices is superior to ingesting pills, and we certainly evolved to get vitamins and minerals in that manner.

Since I'm working on a publishing project dealing with nutrition and fitness right now, I went about researching (on nutritiondata.com) the things I typically eat and how much magnesium they contain. The RDA for males is 420 mg per day, females, 320 mg per day (i.e., the minimum amount you should get, give or take).

2 cups coffee / 14.2 mg
2 squares baking chocolate / 190 mg
8 ounces grassfed ground beef / 38 mg
8 ounces whole milk / 24.4 mg
1 cup spinach / 23.7 mg
1 cup Swiss chard / 150 mg
5-6 ounce filet of haddock / 75 mg
2 ounces cheddar / 15.6
2 Florida oranges / 28.2 mg

That all adds up to 559.1 mg in a day. Cacao, a good source of which is high-cacao chocolate, is a rich source of magnesium. The surprising sources to me were swiss chard and haddock, providing about half of all you would need in a day. The oranges were also a surprisingly good small source (it would depend where they were grown).

This demo is also a good indication that you can derive your nutrition from commonly eaten whole foods, which obviously contain far more vitamins and minerals than just magnesium.

Good Video and Article on BCAAs and Leucine

2011-06-17T09:00:00.000-07:00

This is a very good article, with accompanying podcast, on branched-chain amino acids (BCAAs) and leucine in particular. Amino acids are the building blocks of proteins, and the BCAAs are a subset of amino acids that are particularly essential in muscle-building. Here are some other related posts on the BCAA matter.

A major take-away point is that a great way to get leucine, other than cheddar cheese, and grass-fed meats and eggs, are whey-protein shakes.

I'm not talking about body-building here per se, but living in essence, because bulding and retaining lean muscle mass is the key to a long healthspan.

Climbing Mt. Rainier For Charity: The Jimmy Fund

2011-06-15T09:38:00.000-07:00

I'm going to pause the info-laden posts for a sec and seek donations for my charitable climb of Mt. Rainier. All donations go to The Jimmy Fund, an organization that supports cancer research and care for kids and adults. I made a firstgiving.com page that makes it very easy to donate to the cause.

Please consider donating what you can; $10, for instance, the price of two premium beers or Starbucks drinks?

This climb will take place on July 21-23, 2011, and I'm doing it with a team of 12, including guides. I'm expecting it to be if not life changing, a highly memorable adventure. That's the thing with these climbs; you get all hyped up before they take place, and then the experience is unforgettable, almost religious.

I'm training for the climb now, and I'm planning a couple of posts addressing Alpine Ascents' recommendations, and my own training techniques. Basically I don't think training for high altitude hiking is rocket science. It can be broken down into a few basic principles.

What am I going to be doing? Walking uphill with 45 pounds or so in my pack, so I'm trying to take a heavy hike of enough elevation gain like 3,000+ feet each weekend (last weekend I missed out). This is the concept of specificity; try to simulate exactly what you're going to be doing, and focus on that. Doing a lot of run training like 10k racing wouldn't accomplish much. In fact, you might lose some of the muscle mass you'll need for this kind of strong long-distance hiking.

I'm going to do stadium steps with the weighted pack if I can't get to a mountain in Vermont enough.

I've been weight-lifting all year, so there isn't much more I can do in that respect. I'm strong enough right now. I've added a little easy/uphill mountainbiking just because it uses the big leg muscles and is fun.

The next thing I want to focus on is acclimatizing from sea level for the 2.5 days I will spend at altitude. For example, the first day I'll be hiking up the Muir snowfield from about 5400 feet above sea level to 10,000 feet. The summit day involves getting up at midnight in a tent and climbing from about 11,000 ft. to 14,441.

This doesn't sound like a big deal when you're reading about all these climbs in the Himalayas at 27,000+ feet. But you can really get into trouble with acute mountain sickness (AMS) at even moderate altitudes if you're not well acclimatized and/or you have some bad luck.

I'm lucky enough to be able to schedule a trip with my daughter and friend to sleep and hike at altitude in Montana beforehand, so that I'll be reasonably acclimatized for Rainier. This is much more efficient than trying to do a lot of cardio training; you can be in great running and cycling shape and still fall apart at altitude, if you try to climb without any high-altitude preparation.

Sleeping and hiking at altitude in the Rockies will start raising my red-blood cell count (hermatocrit). It will also start initiating an adaptation called the Bohr Effect, whereby the hemoglobin, the iron/protein complex that transports oxygen throughout your bloodstream, begins to lose its affinitiy for oxygen, and thus releases more of the oxygen to your tissues before it's returned to your lungs.

People who live at altitude exhibit the adaptations of this Bohr Effect.

Now I have to get all my gear together because the weather on Rainier can be very complicated. You can have a nice day, experience ice and rain, then zero degrees with 50 mph winds on the summit, all in a single day!

Having a Zen state of mind is very important. Maybe it's a life lesson that can be learned from mountain experiences. Lots of factors out of my control could prevent me from making the summit, bad weather being the principle one. The important thing is to enjoy and appreciate every minute, and just try to control what you can control.

I once tried to climb Piz Bernina, a classic in the Alps, and didn't make it. I honestly didn't care; I knew it wasn't my day to be on the top of that mountain. Early the next morning I did a traverse of nearby Piz Palu, and it was one of the most sublime experiences of my life. Maybe I'll return to Piz Bernina, if I'm lucky enough. Maybe never. I still did some incredible challenging and sublime climbing that day!

Keep a Cap On Antinutrients

2011-06-10T14:17:00.000-07:00

We're all urged to "eat our fruit and vegetables," a dietary maxim I pretty much stick to. If you're prone to chowing bushels of raw veggies, however, along with grains and soy, you should keep antinutrients in mind. You don't want to consume large quantities of them, which would be defeatist for the nutritionally minded, if not downright toxic.

What are antinutrients? These are the phytochemicals in grains, soy, and other plants that prevent us from absorbing vital nutrients like protein and minerals when they're consumed in copious quantities (thus the "anti" nutrition moniker).

Phytochemicals, in the broadest sense, are chemicals produced by plants.

Plants have evolved their own ways to defend themselves. They don't have teeth or claws (well most plants don't) and can't run away, so their primary defenses are biochemicals that may be designed to prevent the growth and propagation of their predators (like us veggie eaters). Or so the evolutionary theory goes.

The antinutrients include:

Phytic acid or phytates. Phytic acid is found in nuts, grains, and seeds. The purpose of phytates in the plant is to store phosphorous and prevent premature germination. Its concentration is slightly higher in nuts than in oats or whole wheat, but the latter may be eaten in higher quantities and more frequently. Thus the consumption of phytates appears quite widespread.

The problem with phytates is that they bind with minerals such as iron, zinc, and calcium, creating molecular complexes that are indigestible. The mineral content or quality of food doesn't matter if you're not digesting it, or if it's not "bioavailable."

One way to deal with phytates in brown rice is to soak the rice overnight in water with a little lemon juice. Then pour the water out, add new water, and cook the rice the next day. This extra preparatory step removes most of the phytates, so I can continue to enjoy occasional, very moderate amounts of brown rice (I'm a protein/fats guy and not a proponent of eating tons of starch).

Protease inhibitors. Protease enzymes like trypsin are essential enzymes for the digestion of protein. In other words, a trypsin inhibitor is essentially a poison, since humans and other animals need protein to live. Soy beans, grains, nuts, seeds, and various fruits and vegetables contain these trypsin inhibitors. Cooking may largely disable protease inhibitors, according to the linked article. But even small amounts of protease inhibitors, acting in concert with other antinutrients, can contribute to nutritional deficiencies in the long run.

Lectins. These plant biochemicals may play a role in seed germination. Soybeans are high in lectins, for example. "Foods with high concentrations of lectins, such as beans, cereal grains, seeds, and nuts, may be harmful if consumed in excess in uncooked or improperly cooked form. Adverse effects may include nutritional deficiencies, and immune (allergic) reactions."¹

Here are some tips for soaked, fermented, and sprouted food, which are preparations that help remove antinutrients.

¹http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lectin#Toxicity

Aim For Cold Summer Plunges

2011-06-10T05:04:00.000-07:00

The last two days I swam in the 58-degree ocean off of Plum Island near Newburyport, MA. It could actually have been colder; I got the data from this handy, probably auto-generated page. Not having a wetsuit, the only thing I could do was take short dashes then turn around and swim back to the beach.

I knew it was cold because not only was I achy in er, sensitive areas, but I experienced the "mammalian diving reflex," a sort of noticeable gasping effect. This is a built-in physiological reaction that helps dolphins, penguins, and other deft swimmers of the cold ocean. We have a weak version of it that slows the heart-rate, constricts the peripheral veins and capillaries, and shifts most of our blood to the bodily core, the heart and brain. This is why the arms and legs grow steadily more numb in very cold water. It's only triggered when the head is under water.

Cool-water swims or showers are quite healthy when done safely, as I've written before. Studies have shown them to have an immune boosting effect, to improve vascular health and circulation, as well as reduce inflammation. The latter effect is at the very least anecdotal; whenever I pound myself, such as during a long descent from a rocky hike, then swim in very cold water like a river afterwards, my recovery is far faster. In fact, many times, I feel nothing within about an hour, even with my fragile 54+ year old knees!

The chilly immersions always induce the equivalent of a sort of enduro-high.

Here's another really good article on cold water dipping from Mark's Daily Apple, as well as this article here. A cold-water survival page can be found here.

Better Preparation for Tornadoes

2011-06-03T11:20:00.000-07:00

I thought a lot about how unprepared I was for the almost unprecedented destructive power of the tornadoes that landed in western Massachusetts on June 1. ("Almost," because a tornado killed 91 people in Worcester about 50 years ago.) I've got a point that is at least obvious to me: it's climate change! It's climate change! It's climate change! It would take a Tolstoyan sized volume to explore what to do about it (other than being passive, somewhat mesmerized in our complacency).

Suffice it to say, a severe tornado can happen in any habitable area (with the exception probably of towns high in the Rocky Mountains, but they have their own destructive winds at times). We were just lucky in my town in the eastern part of the state. We did have an eerie weird yellow light that evening, as if everything outside was captured in a sepia-tinged photo.

About the only thing you can do with the very good but, by their nature, short-term warnings is to go into the basement. From now on, I will have a little backpack put together for this purpose, containing: 2+ flashlights; a backpacking first-aid kit; a liter bottle of water (minimum); a bunch of Clifbars, nuts, or other foods, and of course you'd bring your cell phone.

You may be buried in the basement, and have to dig yourself out and/or await a rescue. That's the purpose of this emergency kit. Maybe tools and gear such as workman's gloves, a shovel, and a crowbar would be helpful too. And a crank 'er up emergency radio. If you have a basement, examine it for the most structurally sound section to huddle in.

Now to deal with those tall trees on my property...

We Are Still Hunter Gatherers

2011-05-13T11:46:00.000-07:00

A popular meme of the paleo-sphere is that "we are modern people trapped in hunter gatherer bodies." Or, "we can all learn to live better within the body we inherited, which is a hunter gatherer's." This discussion came up in a New York Times online debate involving several scientists, "Do We Want to Be Supersize Humans?"

I quote from one excerpt called "Our Hunter-Gatherer Bodies":

"Humans, as a species, have been around for approximately 10,000 generations, and the human genus has been around for more than 100,000 generations. For all but the last 600 generations, our ancestors were hunter-gatherers. Accordingly, the bodies we inherited are still mostly adapted to a hunter-gatherer way of life, which includes plentiful exercise, and a diet rich in protein and fiber, but low in saturated fat and simple sugars."

"Future progress for the human body ... may require that we eat and exercise more like the hunter-gatherers we evolved to be."

The photo is of Camel's Hump, a mountain in Vermont. Run-off damage has temporarily taken out its summit trail, so all I did is hike around it today for a couple of hours. Yesterday I climbed Mt. Ellen, a 2,500 foot elevation gain in 90 minutes (a good pace). I'm planning on putting together back-to-back hikes with enough poundage on my back to train for Mount Rainer this July, and doing my best to express my hunter-gatherer self.

Getting Your Leap Back

2011-05-10T12:54:00.000-07:00

Today I used what I think is a handy routine for strengthening your legs and improving your jumping ability. The whole routine lasts less than 20 minutes.

First, I did two sets of leg presses. The opening set used a moderate weight/higher rep model to fatigue the slow-twitch (Type I) fiber types, so the second set, pushing a much heavier weight, could call upon the fast-twitch (Type II) muscle fibers. The second set involved the heaviest weight I could push for about five to six repetitions.

This is the leg-press machine where you push the weighted plate away from yourself with your legs, while in a sitting position.

Then I did two sets (using the same model of fatiguing Type I muscle fibers followed by a heavier weight to force an adaptation among the Type II fibers) on a back-squat machine. During the second set, I used about 450#. You have to learn your own safe and effective weight level; as in using no weight at first as you get used to your positionin the machine, then steadily adding plates as you gain experience (the big guys use up to 1,000 pounds, and I'm always expecting their knees to come exploding out of their sockets!).

The machine I used was similar to the one in the picture. After each back-squat set I did a standing jump on to a stool five or six times (i.e., no running head start). The stool was about three feet off the ground. I think this improves explosiveness and strength in the quadriceps, hamstrings, calves, and glutes. It initiates a quick powerful motion and uses the Type II fibers (at least, that's the intent).

The jumping is obviously a natural motion with which you can cultivate a strength you were born with. It made me happy too, demonstrating that I still have some leaping juice left in my arsenal.

Along with gaining muscular strength, the practical value of this routine is that it will also help increase bone density and strength. You're less likely to suffer a fracture performing what you would have thought was an innocuous task (happens a lot as people age, eh?), if you've already spent some time in the gym pushing big weights and jumping, which surely will expose then remedy any muscle or bone-density weaknesses.

A More Forgiving Interval Workout Than Tabata Sprints

2011-05-09T07:50:00.000-07:00

I was never close to a power lifter, but I'm really working my way up the ladder quickly in the bench press. I did 180# this morning, and that was without a spot and a huge strain, meaning I feel I could do about 10# more. My strength has improved by at least 20# or about 12.5% in the last month or so, and I can attribute it to at least two things (what changed in my routine?).

I'm drinking regular whey protein smoothies, a combination of the protein mix, coconut milk, a little fruit, and sometimes an egg or yogurt. I really think the supplemented essential amino acids and branched chain amino acids (a subset of the essentials) really improve muscle function. At 54, I haven't gotten any bigger; I only weight about 142 with < 10% body fat. But perhaps my nervous system has been trained to recruit more and stronger muscle fibers all at once during this routine (weight-lifting is also brain training, after all).

I'm also doing more of my short-term weight-training sessions (< 25 minutes) during the week. Yes, I know you're only supposed to lift about once per week, and I respect the rationale behind that strategy, but I seem to get and stay stronger with multiple short sessions. I also made sure I was able to do my body weight easily 10 times in a row before I started doing heavier weights.

Speaking of efficient routines, via the Clarence Bass site, comes an interval routine that is effective and easier than Tabata sprints.

The easier routine involves 10 one-minute intervals at 60 percent of peak capacity, with a minute rest between each one. A study showed that six sessions in two weeks (three times per week), greatly improved muscle endurance and health. Specifically, both "muscle oxidative capacity," the number of mitochondria in the muscle cells and the amount of oxygen the fibers could use during contraction; and insulin resistance improved by 35 percent during this short period.

Recall that Tabata sprints involve 20-second all-out sprints (running, riding a bike, sprinting in the pool, or elsewhere) with 10-second rests, six to eight repetitions. But Tabata's are hard and painful. Only for experienced athletes who know how to deal with high training-oriented discomfort. The "60 percent" routine, when really only the last repetition should feel a bit hard to get through, are an "easier sell" to the average person or pre-season athlete just getting back into shape. And they are much more effective than grinding out a typical cardio routine for two hours.

A Few Reads to Challenge The Conventional Wisdom

2011-05-08T07:24:00.000-07:00

Here are references to a few things I've read lately that challenge the conventional wisdom about health and diet. Read them yourselves and draw your own conclusions: The New York Times Magazine article Is Sugar Toxic?; and a book by a Danish doctor (Uffe Ravnskov) called Ignore the Awkward! How the cholesterol myths are kept alive.

Everyone has been inculcated with the notion that high cholesterol (CHL) will make you sick and that almost all of us should be investing in cholesterol-lowering statins. Especially the 50+ and 60+ crowd.

The tide seems to be turning, however, against the scientific validity of the theory itself. There are two different books, for instance, called "The Great Cholesterol Con."

The Ravnskov book points to numerous studies that show high CHL (or, higher than the statin advocates would ever recommend) to be beneficial, particularly given its important role in the body (i.e., ingredient of cell membranes; a bodily material used to build hormones, the precursor to the active form of vitamin D3; and even a defense against viruses and bacteria). "More than 20 studies" indicate that older people with higher CHL live longer. The book costs about $10 for the Kindle version on Amazon (you don't have to have a Kindle; just put the software on your computer). Instead of obsessing about your CHL numbers, try giving this short informative book a read!

The Gary Taubes article about sugar, which seems to be as much about food politics as science (the former tending to negate the integrity of the latter), will make you wonder why we still shower children with sugar. I think everyone already knows that sugar is "bad." So why does every holiday, fundraiser, and birthday party involve feeding the "crack habit" and creating more crackheads out of the innocent young-uns? Strike that; crack probably isn't addictive enough to suffice as a proper analogy.

The article speculates that there might be a threshold above which sugar is actually poison (not just in terms of diabetes and heart disease, but cancer too – "sugar feeds cancer," a notion that seems to be accepted more readily by European than American doctors). These days, I apply the same concept to endurance training. It can be damaging above a certain "dose."

Gadgets to Ponder I: The 'MapMyFitness' Tools

2011-05-04T13:49:00.000-07:00

I've never found a tool or a gadget that made me healthier or exercise better. You could probably chuck them all out and you would not be the worse for it; in fact, you might therefore have more active time on your feet, as well as save a little money.

On second thought, I suppose the only "tool" that has proved to be useful is a daily fitness log that goes back to 1999, but for reasons that I did not envision when I first started typing daily activities into a text file (the simple format I used has not changed).

It now turns out to be a useful diary and record for recalling important events in life and what I was doing during that day, the weather, etc. (like births of children and 9/11). It's also an amazing record of when I was sick or on the edge of catching something, as this was also noted. I can tell you now that I get sick a fraction of the time I did when I was younger and doing a ton of cardio, thus suppressing my immune system (e.g., in the last year, birthday to birthday, I've had one little sniffle that caused me to take one day off from skiing.)

I've used plenty of tools however that were fun to mess with in a gadget-freak kind of way, and they all have something in common. They provide feedback about some parameter like running or cycle time, speed at certain places in the course, the elevation of the course, etc. One Summer I had a mountainbike in Switzerland and did several climbs that were on a par with a Tour de Suisse type stage (including the Klausenpass which was a highest rated or HC climb in the actual tour de Suisse).

My Garmin watch captured the routes and elevation of each climb, showing me at which point of the route the road steepness was 10 percent or more, my pace at that point, then outputted everything in a nice visual graphic. I found it thrilling looking at the results afterward, and I think that's part of the oomph behind the popular GPS-enabled mapping tools.

The mapmyfitness flagship site, essentially an online tool, is one of the newer and more comprehensive tools for mapping and logging fitness events. They've enthusiastically, by logical extension, spun off the same idea to create mapmyrun, mapmybike, mapmyhike, mapmywalk, mapmymtn, and mapmytri for triathlon.

I found it easy to use and produce a map for an easy mountainbike I took the other day. It gives you several options for drawing the map, computes the distance, then predictably saves all the maps for your perusal the next time you login.

Fitness Facebook

Of course, it being 2011 and not 1999 anymore, the real purpose and goal of the "mapmy" tools is to become some sort of Fitness Facebook. The social networking features predominate, and the users are expected to join groups and share routes and find (and I suppose reject and then become hardened competitors with) friends, as the current mantra is that the path to success is via social networking. What will replace that, as all web fads eventually fizzle out?

All the techie, solipsistic stuff that I tend to focus on like the mapping and logging of workouts (if I did a lot of workouts like these anymore, which I don't -- unless they come up with "MapMyBenchpress") I suppose is considered secondary keyboard candy to the stepped up friend-finding of the site. I guess that shows my age.

I am moving into my mountain hiking season, so I intend to be an active friend (did I say that right?) on mapmymtn. Or was that mapmyhike? I think the site(s) are promising and definitely worth a visit.

The American Indian Diet and Their Peak Health

2011-05-01T12:25:00.000-07:00

Ever since coming back from Montana, I've been reading the three novellas contained in Jim Harrison's Legends Of The Fall, and came upon this funny and telling fictional journal entry about an American Indian named One Stab:

"A man who shoots a buffalo and not eat the entire body and make a tent or bed of the skin should himself be shot, including the bone marrow which Stab says restores all health to the human body."

From a book about the Indian Wars in the Great Plains called Scalp Dance, which I'm also reading, comes this quote from a letter written by George Armstrong Custer about shooting a young buffalo. A Cheyenne guide came up, and "before the blood had stopped flowing," cut out the heart and kidneys and ate them, "just as you would an apple."

A book about the New England Indians of the 18th century called Flintlock & Tomahawk points out the the typical diet of these people was "broiled venison, fish, fowl, bird's eggs, chestnuts, berries, and groundnuts (a tuber like a potato)." No sugar, refined flour, or vegetable oils need apply for the American Indian.

What was the effect of the dietary habits of the equestrian, nomadic Plains Indians that the Europeans displaced (an era involving some of the most appalling atrocities, on both sides, ever committed by warring humans)?

The nineteenth century Plains Indians were probably the tallest people on earth at that time, a convincing measure of the overall health of a population, according the scientist quoted in the article. They averaged five foot eight (an inch below today's Americans, but far more lithe and fat-free). For example, the Sioux chief Red Cloud was about six foot and athletically built.

I think the anthropologist Jarod Diamond might conclude that the Indians were defeated by "guns, germs, and steel," and were probably taller and physically stronger than many of the Europeans that opposed them. This health and stature derived from their hunter-gatherer, nomadic lifestyle and especially a diet dominated by fish and wild game, not just the muscle but lots of bison fats and internal organs.

I didn't eat like a Crow, Blackfeet, Cheyenne, or Sioux in Montana. Can't boast of that. But I did eat a lot of bison, venison, and elk.

Eating Insects

2011-05-01T10:02:00.000-07:00

There, got your attention, didn't I? Nothing like a pithy headline. Insects are actually rich sources of protein and minerals, not to mention high calorie, so they're filling. Here's one site that describes the nutritional content of certain bugs, via the bay area bug eating society (BABES). How'd you like to be a fly on the wall at their meetings (pun intended)?

Here's another insect nutrition site, and if you want to sift through a search, try this.

One recent Summer, my backyard was literally crawling with grass-hoppers. If that happens again, I'm going to start gobbling them up. Bake 'em at 350 with a little iodized salt. With the food prices these days, seriously, where else can you get a big chunk of free protein, calcium, and iron?

Watch the pesticide contamination, however, and don't eat the "wrong bug" (the usually brightly colored ones that contain toxins for their own defense). The Discovery Magazine includes an article about a guy who's advocating the farming of insects for food, because it's a far more sustainable food source, and more or less inexhaustible. Given the on-going food crisis in the world, particularly involving quality protein, I'm willing to entertain this notion.

There's actually a word for eating insects, entomophagy. If your neighbor looks at you strangely because you had "crickets" for lunch, just tell him you're a entomophagist.

A Dip Into the Big Sky, Montana Steeps

2011-04-17T13:53:00.000-07:00

They're bombing in Montana this morning. Not the NATO kind, but ski patrol "bombing" the cornices and chutes to clear any potential avalanches before the skiers reach the upper mountain area at Big Sky. You hear the thunder in the background beginning at about 7:30 AM, and having seen a large "avie" once in the Alps (sounds like a roar, a freight train) I'm not sure whether the audible effect is more the guns or the descending snow.

Good thing they're doing it. Still tons of snow here on April 17. As in any ski area, the ski patrol here has a critical and complex job. Up beneath Lone Mountain yesterday (11,100+ feet above sea level; very picturesque peak), I saw dogs too, with the ability to sniff out anyone caught in an avalanche.

The location is south of Bozeman, southwestern Montana, in the Madison Range near the West Yellowstone entrance and Wyoming. We've only skied here two days (my 7-year-old son and myself), and we both did really well with the altitude. It helps to sleep at altitude and guzzle tons of water. I think my conditioning is good with the all-season weight lifting (knock on wood) as these big-mountain runs go on forever, and the above the tree-line skiing is steep and inspiring.

On our second day, we skied powder through some glades that Scott picked out and navigated. Later in the day, I went to the upper mountain area and skied The Bowll and a high ridge off their challenger chair. Very deep snow, steep ledges, powder practice (for me), and real thigh burners, but the snow is so deep it's very easy to maintain control.

The size of the area beneath the summit, hundreds of acres of wide open snowfields that seem to roll along forever, blows this Easterner's mind. They have a tram to the summit, and I'm waiting for the lines to thin out during the week. I should get some more great photos.

Defeating the Terminal Zombie Woes: Airport Exercise

2011-04-13T04:49:00.000-07:00

You can generally get around the forced sedentary behavior of airports by crafting your own exercise routine and using airport gyms. I'm going to be in airports tomorrow, and by using this airportgyms.com web site, I checked out their results for Boston and Denver, just to test what's available.

I got three hits for Boston, but two involved 10 minute taxi rides, so they're not really located at the airport. They're in hotels that allow you to buy a day pass to use their weight machines, which is worth it only if you have a very long wait at an airport and want to cough up the taxi and gym-pass fare.

Another "hit" on the web site specified that that the Health Club & Spa at the Hilton Hotel was a five minute walk from the terminals. That's good, but a little note suggested that they were no longer allowing people hanging out at Logan Airport to use their facilities. Denver also produced three hits on airport gyms, but all of them required taxi rides and a note stated "Denver's airport is located such that it can take some time to get on and off the 'compound'."

I guess you have to do some research on airport gyms before you leave.

I only found a gym located at an airport, for example, in a big hub like Chicago, so I assume for most travelers who don't want to jump in a cab and actually leave the airport for a lengthy time (and expense), these "airport gyms" do not yet have a lot of practical value (the web site is a good resource however once airports start getting their act together).

You can create your own exercise at the airport, which is always a good idea since we know that endless sitting is very bad in the long run. Plus, all that lousy food, stress, and lethargy feels bad in general, right? First, just constantly walk, ideally outside, and try to take carry-on stuff in a backpack. This makes it easier to convert your airport waits into weighted hikes, which is a great form of exercise.

Constantly drink water and refrain from stuffing your gullet with all that crappy airport food like pizza, old cellophane wrapped sandwiches, vending machine junk, and er, wine and margaritas. Just bring some nuts or grab a piece of fruit once in a while. Fasting is perfect for airports.

Along with walking, use the hard seats for inverted push-ups; meaning push-ups with your feet off the ground. They don't last long enough to break a sweat, unless you're waiting in an airport in Jakarta (even then they might be blasting the AC), and just a few sets of these push-ups is great exercise.

You can probably also find a place to do pull-ups, and who cares what the other passengers think! You'll probably inspire them. Do some deep knee bends with your backpack on, and if you're outside in the cool weather on a tarmac, try some jumping jacks. The trip will be far pleasanter and healthier than becoming just another "terminal zombie."

Survival II: Eating During Times of Scarcity

2011-04-01T07:09:00.000-07:00

I admire the way the Japanese people have been able to bear up to an appallingly bad natural and nuclear disaster, a negative Black Swan confected out of a Hollywood writer's formulaic imagination. They are calm, steadfast, focused, and cooperative. I have a feeling this depiction on newscasts is accurate enough (obviously, I am not in Japan.) I've donated to the Japanese Red Cross Society.

Along the lines of sudden scarcity, what would you do to gather food for yourself and family members? This will not be a long and exhaustive post; many volumes have been written about nutrition, hydration, and survival. This is just a short reflection on the issue of seeking and storing food efficiently during or in preparation for a crisis.

Obviously, if you were left in a devastated area, you would eat whatever edible item you could find. Things in cans and packages that haven't spoiled; tuna, canned fruit or vegetables, cooked rice, crackers come to mind. This is lowest-common-denominator, pure-emergency eating, including of course "junk food."

In some circumstances, you might even be able to pass over junk food that in the long term won't do you any good, even during an emergency (like a bag of marshmallows or cheese doodles). One of the advantages of doing regular intermittent fasts, is that they actually teach your body to burn more fats, providing a reliable source of slow-burning fuel. In essence, you're cultivating an adaptation to a lower-calorie state that could come in handy in an emergency.

It would be ideal to encounter filling whole foods, for their nutritional content and lack of excess saltiness, such as apples or a bag of carrots. These are also transportable and last a reasonable length of time (a granny smith apple will easily last more than a day in a backpack).

Once you have overcome the spoiling issue, from an efficiency standpoint, you want to aim for energy dense foods, in order to get more nutritional bang for your buck. This concept also applies to the ideal foods to add to an emergency store, or take along with you on a long trek, say, through the mountains.

What are energy dense foods? In a word, high-fat foods, which generally have nine calories per gram, compared with sugary foods or carbohydrate, which have four calories per gram. These energy dense foods include nuts (e.g., almonds, walnuts, macadamias – there's that ease-of-storage and transportable feature again), animal products (including "jerkies" like beef jerky, though these tend to be higher in protein than fat), coconut milk, seafood, cheese, and whole milk or cream.

Starvation or need is not the time to indulge a fat-phobia. You and especially children require lots of calories to move, deal with possible temperature extremes, and cope with stress. These calorie dense nutrients will last a long time as well, because they are metabolically superior to carbs. They are low-glycemic, meaning they don't launch a lot of insulin (like bread, pasta, rice), to burn off your blood sugar and make you hungry again in a short period of time.

For further insightful discussion of nutritional metabolism, see Gary Taubes's post here, or especially the last hour of Dr. Doug McGuff's lecture on metabolism (or watch the whole thing of course, if you have time).

Third, you're aiming for protein, which often will be included in the same package as the higher fat foods like nuts, meats, seafood, and dairy (including yogurt). I have a feeling a lot of powdered milks are of low quality; I could be wrong. I store a lot of nuts and energy bars (yeah, they are a processed food with a lot of carbs, but they last a long time and have a lot of protein). Whey protein powder includes a complete complement of protein, meaning all of the essential amino acids for a day. You could carry whey protein in a ziplock bag, and in a pinch, stir it into some warm water and knock it back.

As another example of "survival eating," my son and I are partial to watching Bear Grylls's Man V. Wild shows. His survival scenarios involve a lot of hunting and gathering in various remote areas. He doesn't spend a lot of time grazing on veggies; once in a while he finds fruit, honey, or a nut. The vast majority of the time it's insects and the animals that he kills. The show has a Hollywood flair, but these choices are realistic in an emergency scenario.

I think this gives us a good start on what to aim for in nutritionally in a crisis. In fact, the choices are not very different than my own eating regimen!

Chock One Up To Serendipity

2011-03-28T15:29:00.000-07:00

I found a geat hike today, completely unanticipated and off-the-cuff. I was just going to take a standard early-morning loop near the Lincoln Peak area of Vermont. I walked up a hill past some condos, it was sunny and cold, just in the low 20s Fahrenheit, when I noticed the entrance to a snowshoe trail.

The snow was hard enough to walk on, so I just went up into the forest, lots of old hardwoods and birch in the newly fallen snow (even though it's Spring ...) I kept following the trail and came to an open slope, so I walked up that, feeling really good in the cold sun. I'd had a hardy Paleo breakfast: a cheese omelot with two pastured eggs, an avocado, and a lot of fruit.

I took a branch off that trail, a narrower path off what turned out to be a ski slope, and ended up hiking into Slide Brook Basin (SBB). I found the area through an entrance I didn't even know existed. SBB is a 2,000-acre off-piste habitat for black bear, moose, and other critters. It's popular for alpine off-piste skiing in the winter. I could see where the bears had ripped into the beech trees to mark their territory. Apparently, they'd started to wake up from hibernation!

I had nothing with me, provision-wise, not even a backpack, so after a while I just turned around and walked back. It ended up being a 2.5 hour walk involving all new terrain and nice steep hiking. Chock that up to serendipity!

It's off topic, but you might appreciate this pizza recipe without all the junky refined flour for the crust.

Useful Recipe for Cauliflower Pizza
courtesy of girlgoneprimal.

1 large head of cauliflower
2 cups cheese (mozzarella, cheddar, or a combo of both)
2 eggs

Optional herbs (thyme, fennel, oregano, basil & parsley all work wonderfully)

Method:

Pre-heat oven to 200 degrees Celsius. Line pan or pizza stone with baking paper.

Rice the cauliflower by putting florets into a food processor and buzzing until finely processed (but not mushy). Place cauliflower into a microwave-safe bowl and zap for 6-8 minutes. You should end up with about two cups of riced cauliflower.

Mix in cheese and eggs until smooth. Spread evenly over baking paper in a round shape. Sprinkle with herbs. Place in over until golden on top and starting to crisp around the edges (around 15 minutes in my oven).

Remove from oven and add desired toppings. I used sliced tomato, sliced capsicum, mozz & parmesan cheese, mushrooms and some meat (only had salami). I choose to sprinkle cheese over toppings, rather than placing it between the base and the toppings. The cheese in the base helps keep the topping in place and connected to the base.

Place completed pizza back in the oven until the cheese melts and toppings are cooked to your preference. Cut and serve while hot. Also delicious reheated.

Books and Videos Offered on Discount For Japan Disaster Relief

2011-03-21T16:47:00.000-07:00

O'Reilly Media, my publisher, is offering a 50 percent discount on various eBooks and videos, including at least one of my books, to donate relief funds to Japan. I will donate any royalties I receive on this sale to the same cause, the Japanese Red Cross Society. For details, go here: oreil.ly/free2choose-japan or here, http://oreilly.com/store/dd-jpn.html.

A Nice Drill on The Slope

2011-03-21T06:18:00.001-07:00

It certainly was a beautiful first day of Spring yesterday in the mountains. I discovered a routine that offered a good combination of uphill and downhill efforts without excessively elevating the heart-rate or running myself into the ground. I took the chairlift and then duck-walked with my alpine skis to the top of Lincoln Peak in Vermont. Then I skied all the way to the bottom on Jester and Lower Jester without stopping.

Then I got back on the chairlift and did the same thing again, with a different route downhill. The uphill part on skis to reach the summit segment just beneath the observation deck on Lincoln is the "heart pumping" part. The downhill run, maybe 8-10 minutes at most, is more of a coordination, balance, and fun "get outside in the sun" drill, with some upper-leg weight-bearing work, depending on how hard you ski or turn. I didn't have to ski that much after I took those two runs, because they represented "the complete package" for an efficient day's exercise.

I usually tell my friends, who mostly are of the backend of mid-Fifties age, to combine resistance training and weights with "just a little cardio" (whatever it may be: running, cycling, Nordic skiing). Keep the big cardio efforts to a bare minimum, so that you can maintain lean body mass (with weight training, including body-weight stuff like pull-ups, and paleo-type eating) and minimize or eliminate athletic self-destruction.

Speaking of Survival

2011-03-18T11:38:00.000-07:00

I could be wrong, but it seems that most modern Western citizens live in a 21st century bubble of technical protection. They think they will never find themselves in a survival situation with all those synthetic protections having instantly vanished or been swept away, such as a powerful earthquake or other natural disaster, as "those things only happen in other places" like Japan, Christchurch, New Zealand, and Haiti.

No one would say this out loud, but the attitude is implied by a general peevishness towards modern comforts ("this building isn't warm enough for me" or "the wireless here stinks"), and a lack of conditioning that has become universal among people of a variety of ages. This is a roundabout way of stating that good physical conditioning, in terms of strength and flexibility, and a steady attitude, can save your life. Or someone else's dear to you.

I suppose this approach to exercise, such as training with weights, gives it more of a practical purpose, beyond just "day to day maintenance." I can think of at least three concerete examples in real-world survival situations, even though the news wires probably contain one every day.

One is the older Japanese fellow who survived two days about ten miles out to sea on the roof of his house, following the earthquake and tsunami.

This is all conjecture of course, and I have no idea how strong he is, but I know from the picture that the 60-year-old was at least slim and fit-looking. First, he survived the brutal opening moments of the quake and even more so the tsunami, no small feats. Second, he was resourceful enough to keep himself together mentally, making a red flag to wave to rescuers, and generally not letting hunger or thirst get the best of him. Finally, he simply didn't give up, which a survival expert (which I am not) would consider highly important, along with "constantly making decisions" and planning what to do next to promote survival.

The good movie "127 Hours" depicts Aaron Ralston in the Utah desert, in his almost hopeless predicament, probing around in his backpack with his one useful arm and constantly devising new survival strategies. Ralston was obviously a fit and strong climber before his accident.

Another example of the practical effect of strength work comes from Christchurch. The nice blog Conditioning Research points to a blogger in New Zealand who experienced the earthquake.

The man made the interesting point that, in his opinion, an earthquake victim benefits from strength and agility, and at no time is "maximum aerobic output" required (although I could imagine a lengthy dash, say a quarter mile to a mile, may be required to flee a tsunami).

Finally, I heard an interview on public radio with a man who was caught at night by the tsunami that followed the recent earthquake in Chile. He was required to scale a cliff behind his hotel to escape the rising waters.

How confident, amidst being scared s***less, would you be in one of these situations if you had already conscientiously been lifting weights, sprinting, and climbing? What if you had to carry a child up a building or a cliff?

An Insightful Video, and Ancestral Health Conference Picks Up Steam

2011-03-13T09:16:00.000-07:00

The photo is an arbitrary shot of my son Scott and the vehicle that took us to mid-mountain in Vermont, where we ate dinner and skied down with headlamps on at night. What a blast!

Consider devoting some time to watching this very insightful video in which Body By Science author Dr. Doug McGuff discusses resistance training, evolutionary biology, and his own views of nutrition, exercise, and metabolism. His discussion is provocative, original, and can be understood by the layman. Hey, you might learn something useful.

Meanwhile, it's full-steam ahead with the Ancestral Health Symposium in Los Angeles, August 5-6, 2011. They've recently posted the speakers and topic list. It is a gathering of the Paleo glitterati, the Paleotocracy, the ... okay forget trying to coin a catchy term. Suffice it to say, several bright scientists, doctors, researchers, and writers will speak about this growing field of ancestral health.

Exercise V. Ageing – And Questioning the Wisdom of Mega Endurance Bouts

2011-03-09T09:54:00.000-08:00

A couple of interesting health pieces in the New York Times, which basically discuss recent studies on the topics of exercising, ageing, and mega endurance exercise.

In the blog on the ageing/exercise experiment, people studied mice whose mitochondria, the intra-cellular engines that power metabolism, were programmed to accelerate the ageing process. These mice shriveled up, went gray, and died much earlier than they were supposed to, except for a segment of these mice that were exercised on a wheel a couple of times per week from when they were three months old.

These mice showed far fewer signs of ageing, had more mitochondria than their non-exercising counterparts, despite their mutation, and lived longer.

A link to the study is here.

Some effects of mega endurance

According to this piece, another study showed, not surprisingly, that extreme endurance training (like running many marathons over several years) had generated fibrosis, or scarring, of the heart muscle. A control group of people of the same age category who hadn't done long runs had no fibrosis. The scarring, if severe, can lead to heart malfunctions and failure.

I guess, however maudlin, the moral of the story is "moderation in everything."

Two studies:

Diverse patterns of myocardial fibrosis in lifelong, veteran endurance athletes.

Cardiac Arrhythmogenic Remodeling in a Rat Model of Long-Term Intensive Exercise Training

Wired for Adventure

2011-03-07T12:57:00.000-08:00

Are we hard-wired for outdoor survival feats and adventure? It certainly seems that way.

A vigorous, maybe even borderline dangerous outdoor adventure like hiking a steep remote mountain (or not so steep, not so remote ... ), white-water rafting, or Antarctic ice treks seems to generate intense feelings and lifelong memories among their participants.

One study after another demonstrates the superior benefits of exercising or being outside rather than inside some kind of modern industrial setting. We've reached the point where this factor is understood as a given. We don't have to spend money studying it anymore.

It seems reasonable to think that we evolved to take part in these activities over hundreds of thousands of years. It might not be too romantic to think that they leave us with a healthy residue; we're in better shape for having undertaken an adventure, if only by training to prepare for it, along with the nourishment of the soul that ends up as a result.

Outdoors evolutionary imperative

Evolution has provided the physiological apparatus to survive and flourish outside, even though most of us live predominantly indoor existences. A day doesn't go by without the "flight or fight" mechanism involving the hypothalamus and adrenal glands empowering a miraculous recovery or rescue.

We are not well adapted, on the other hand, to the chronic low-level stresses we're all familiar with: traffic jams, deadlines, overtime, the parental drop-off/pick-up treadmill, the slavery to the clock that ravages our health and metabolism (usually by whacking out our endocrine system, by the excess secretion of stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline — a continuous rather than intermittent flight-or-fight response).

Thrashing around outside

Just as a example of a modest venture outdoors, here is an excerpt from my column for The Valley Reporter in Vermont, describing my own recent thrashings around in the forest, with or without skis.

I've only hiked the Long Trail once in the winter. Given the warmth and the sun, on a whim, I packed a backpack that has side straps for skis, with my hiking boots (I do not have alpine touring (AT) equipment, yet), then skied over to the Heaven's Gate chairlift at Sugarbush.

The plan was to hike from Lincoln Peak to Castlerock then ski down. But Heaven's Gate was on a wind hold, so I ended up on the Castlerock chair. The Long Trail enters the woods just to the right of the Castlerock warming hut. I sat outside on the deck in the warm sun and changed shoes, strapping the skis to the side of the backpack and stuffing the ski boots and one of my coat layers.

It felt good to be in hiking boots, loosey-goosey and all that toe room, and the rig on my back felt stable enough. On the trail, I passed that old sign that says "Do not ski this trail alone – turn back now." I thought of the Dante's Inferno line, "Abandon hope all ye who enter here." I noticed that the "n's" on the sign were inverted, apropos of nothing. It was pleasant walking and easy to locate the trail for about 30 meters.

Then the effects of winter nights reappeared.It was just deep snow and toppled trees and dead-wood branches that snagged the top of the skis on the backpack. I made a few stabs into the woods but could not pick up the trail. It didn't seem like anyone had been on it for a couple of days, or longer. The pack was feeling cumbersome, so I put it down and right away, free of the skis, found the trail on foot. I put the pack back on and kept going through a lovely evergreen tunnel that would be the perfect height for a seven year old.

My rig did not seem to be working anymore against the overhead branches. At times I was semi-crawling. The mountain was laughing at me, and me at myself. I started to break through the still deep snow. I was not locating the trail about one third of the time, then one time I followed animal tracks (there were pads all over the place), and it actually worked, like Scott's story.

The trail was still largely erased by deeply drifted snow. I only saw a white hash mark once. I was alone, the sun outlining the stark beauty of the trees, and i was nevertheless having a great time. The upshot was that I ended up turning around and following my tracks back to the Castlerock hut. The ski patrolman inside the hut waved wanly with a "didn't I just see you?" look.

Slide Brook Basin

A few days later I took a tour of Slide Brook Basin, from the entrance at the top of North Lynx at Sugarbush. I was with a guide and a skilled young skier named Tate. I think that everyone has preconceptions of what Slide Brook will be like. Mine was one of remoteness and solitude. However, when we went down there, whipping along the narrow trail that provides a traverse from which skiers drop down into the glades, the conditions were great and many other skiers were present.

The first run was pretty fast, about 20 minutes, and I must admit, I was really baked at the end. The guide wanted to get in two runs. I'm naturally a slow descender and like to stop and look around; listen (another admission: I am generally better going up mountains than down). However, the second run was slower, steeper, and deeper into the woods off to the skier's left, and I held my own a bit better. The whole week left me with some good memories, already filed away for 2011.

Resistance Training Helps Prevent Injuries

2011-02-20T13:40:00.000-08:00

Resistance training will not only add lean body mass and thus improve metabolism, it will keep you on your feet. Injury prevention is a bit difficult to quantify, because never getting injured is not verifiable proof that high-intensity weight training is the reason why. It could just be luck.

This short PDF file has a pretty good explanation for how resistance training can prevent you from breaking down, by increasing bone mineral density, as well as the strength of muscles and connective tissue. Anecdotally, however, I can think of at least two recent instances where my weights regimen prevented a fall or another incident from putting me out of action and perhaps on to a surgeon's table, particularly considering that I am an over 50 guy.

I read a chapter recently about skiing the woods and the recommendation to not wear the wrist strap with your poles, because some skiers have separated their shoulders. I couldn't quite understand this mechanism until I was skiing myself through trees, caught my pole on a branch or trunk, and suddenly felt the sensation of the pole being yanked from my gloved hand. I yanked back, equalizing the pressure, and just kept skiing. It all took just a second.

I do a ton of inverted push-ups and bench presses, and I think my shoulder strength prevented anything happening at all then. A branch from a small sapling also split my lower lip that day, and I wandered through the lodge later to the men's room, having just tasted a little salt on the tip of my tongue. Then I looked at myself in the mirror, and my chin was entirely covered with wind-dried blood. A guy looks at me and says, "you know you're a tree skier when..." Another person probably saw me walking through the lodge and thought "who's the dork with the blood on his face?"

Another time early this Fall I took a pretty bad fall trying out downhill mountainbiking in Vermont. Failing to make a turn and just smacking the rocky, muddy path with my shoulder and clavicle (BTW, I'm not going to be taking part in that sport very much!). Nothing happened, but I easily could have been a candidate for a "mountain litter" that day.

The moral of the story, if there is one, is that resistance training can simply make up for what Mother Nature isn't doing for you anymore as you age (making muscle; as men age, they become efficient at making fat).

The Unbearable Lightness of Deep Sleep

2011-02-09T15:16:00.000-08:00

Here's a bromide; sleep is important. This is purely an anecdotal observation, but frequent adequate snoozes might be more important than good nutrition. I know that when I get nine hours sleep, I feel like a world beater; when I get six or less, the kindergartners would out-do me on standardized tests, my conversation is curt and truncated, and all I think about is when I'm going to get a nap, no matter how well I've eaten that week.

The latest science supports our views of sleep. Here's a recent Science Daily report on a study about the importance of sleep and the suppression of the hormone melatonin (when you don't get enough).

In the study, the people who were exposed to artificial light during the hours when they should have been sleeping emitted half the normal healthy levels of melatonin. This hormone plays an important role in "regulat[ing] body temperature, blood pressure and glucose levels." So sleep deprivation = melatonin deprivation = insulin resistance?

Given that chronic light suppression of melatonin has been hypothesized to increase relative risk for some types of cancer and that melatonin receptor genes have been linked to type 2 diabetes, our findings could have important health implications...

Another study found that chronic lack of sleep, averaging less than six hours per evening, is a strong risk factor for colon cancer, and they hypothesize this may be linked to suppressed melatonin levels.

Getting more zees is probably the easiest thing to do to fend off the prescription treadmill, and given that reference to a "your health is in your hands" mindset ...

Another Science Daily article suggests that lifestyle is much more important than genes in determining longevity, based on the results of a Swedish study that began in 1913 and followed its subjects for several decades until they were quite old.

Go outside when the sun comes up, greet the sun, adjust your melatonin-initiated internal clock (and don't forget those power naps).

Activate Your Own Antioxidant Defenses

2011-02-05T14:46:00.001-08:00

A good article in The Huffington Post discusses a different way to reduce the buildup of "free radicals" (FR) in the body. FR, or reactive oxygen species, cause cellular stress and can mutate or damage cells. The writer discusses an alternative to gulping high doses of multivitamin supplements to "neutralize" the free-radical molecules. Namely, ingest foods, such as broccoli, turmeric, green tea, and coffee, that activate the body's own defenses against oxidative damage.

At the center of these natural biochemical defenses is primarily a protein in a cell's nucleus called Nrf2, according to the article. (Keep in mind that the researcher who wrote this article sells an "Nrf2 activator" supplement, so that there was a clear, somewhat sneaky promotional aspect to this article. The information still seems worthwhile.)

What do the terms "free radical," oxidative damage, and antioxidant mean? Free radicals are essentially molecules that are generated as a result of normal metabolism, but they can be increased to damaging levels by various stresses, such as a poor diet and excess cardio-type exercise. An example of oxidation in action is when you take a bite out of an apple and leave it on the counter. The fruit begins to turn brown, or "oxidizes" as it is exposed to the air.

Here is the article's own description:

Antioxidants are chemicals that break down or neutralize the damaging effects of free radicals -- chemicals produced as a byproduct of normal cellular metabolism. Under normal circumstances, there is a balance between the rate at which free radicals are produced and the rate at which they are eliminated by the action of antioxidants.

Free radicals are destructive in that they cause oxidative damage to tissues -- essentially causing tissues to rust like a piece of iron left outside in the weather. They damage proteins, fat and even our DNA. In fact, damage to our tissues by free radicals is thought to underlie the process of aging, a theory first described by Dr. Denham Harmon in his "free radical theory of aging" proposed in 1956. Indeed, Dr. Harmon laid the groundwork for the whole antioxidant industry when he demonstrated that free radicals are "quenched" by antioxidants.

...So if in fact our brain tissue is being assaulted by free radicals does it make sense to load up with antioxidants? To answer the question consider the fact that your brain contains about 10 billion cells, each of which generates thousands of free radicals daily.

So one might ask, how effectively would say a vitamin E capsule or a glass of some exotic juice perform when confronted by this onslaught of free radicals? Common antioxidants work by sacrificing themselves when confronted by free radicals. Thus, one molecule of vitamin C is destroyed when neutralizing one free radical molecule.

This neutralizes the free radical but at the cost of the molecule of vitamin C. Can you imagine how much vitamin C or other oral antioxidant it would take to neutralize the astronomical number of free radicals generated by the body on a daily basis?

So how do you activate this protein that the writer claims has the role of neutralizing free radicals? As mentioned certain nutritional elements help activate Nrf2, including coffee and tea (as if I needed more motivation to guzzle more java). It would be interesting to test the effect of more sleep on the Nrf2 pathway, as sleep has a healing effect, and the harvesting or neutralizing of reactive oxygen species seems to be a form of rejuvenation.

Adventures In Snow

2011-01-22T11:01:00.000-08:00

Just because it's cold out doesn't mean that you cannot go out and have an adventure. I've been playing in the snow in north-central Vermont, where winter has arrived with a welcome or a vengeance, depending on your attitude. The Mad River Valley has received going on five feet of snow in about two weeks.

Two days ago I was skiing on Paradise off near the top of Lincoln Peak at the Sugarbush resort. This trail is a natural-snow, wooded area that contains slopes, glades, and sections of more dense forest at its periphery. I was skiing on a weekday, so I was off on my own on a nice peaceful late afternoon run.

The woods were full of soft powdery snow so I kept edging to my left to find more inviting clusters of trees, when all of a sudden, I was kind of lost in a denser tighter segment of snow-filled forest. The view was deceptive, except of course for the up and downhill topography. The landscape had a kind of sameness, coniferous trees, deep sloping snow, and poor visibility through the foliage. The snow was probably too deep to backtrack on my existing route, because of the difficulty and lengthy time to step with skies through thick foliage.

Stupid mistake, my bad. This is how people get lost in in-bounds ski areas (and the skier or boarder suddenly finds themselves out of bounds). Don't ski alone in glades, and always know where your track is leading.

Because of the snow depth, I didn't have much choice but to follow a down slope through the trees along an existing track left by another skier or snowboarder. It wasn't as if it was a dire situation; I could hear the snow guns making snow a short distance away. Finally, I reached a fire road, took a right, and ended up back on the main trail. I had a little adrenaline going (read: fear). Things can go bad quickly in the woods with the sun going down (for example, tonight it will be colder than 10 below F., without the wind). So skiers and trekkers, especially kids, should not venture "off the map" or into the winter wilderness alone. And it helps to know how to build a snow cave if you do get stuck.

Yesterday I had a nice run down Rumble, a narrow, steep, classic northern New England ski trail full of deep clumps of powder. It has knobby, sometimes exposed rocks at head and knee height, which means you really have to make certain turns (rather than ski straight off the cliff, which I can't [shouldn't] do). It was good practice for having a preconception of how you will navigate the trail falling away before you.

Now tonight the cold sets in; Sunday it will be colder than 22 below, without the wind. Sometimes Mother Nature presents you with the opportunity for adventure solely in the form of climate itself.

"Couch Potatoism" Degrades Health, Even With Gym Visits

2011-01-14T04:33:00.000-08:00

It appears that the obverse of this blog's message, stay inside and don't move, will degrade health, and is not mitigated by brief bursts at the gym.
This article in The New York Times describes one recent study which found that the people who spent four or more hours per day in front of screens (i.e., TVs and computers) had significantly greater rates of disease and mortality than those who spent two hours or less, regardless of other mitigating factors like smoking and social class.

The study, in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, found that cardiovascular events like heart attacks, as well as the overall death rate, was substantially greater among those that reported the greatest "screen time." The numbers were only slightly better among those who mixed in frequent gym visits around their slacker behavior.

In other words, an hour at the gym is not going to compensate for seven hours in front of the Super Bowl.

The study speculates that sedentary behavior causes low-level inflammation (e.g., as indicated by C Reactive Protein tests) and metabolic dysfunctions with the enzyme lipoprotein lipase, which plays an important role with lipid metabolism.

The study involved about 4,500 men in Scotland, but several other studies have found lots of problems with sedentary behavior, such as higher blood pressure readings among the kids who watched the most TV.

The upshot is, well, avoid sedentary behavior. When you're computing, do it standing up as much as possible. Take frequent walks around your work-outs; break up long drives with frequent rest stops and exercise. Go outside and move every 45 minutes or so, if you work in a corporate factory. If the "office ogres" don't permit you to, then consider looking for another job. If you have a physical or active job, then you might be be one of the lucky ones. Don't allow your body to make metabolic adaptations to sedentary behavior.

Study: A Little Probiotics Helps Winter Athletes, And Others

2011-01-12T11:20:00.000-08:00

Allow a little segue to explain both of these photos: the beach on Plum island (PI), Mass. where I sprinted two days ago. This was about 35 minutes of jogging, sprinting, and walking, including about 6 all out intervals of 75 to 100+ yards on the hard sand. Just me, the ocean, and the seagulls.

Euphoric. I didn't encounter another human for several miles. PI, including more than six miles of open beach refuge, is a really special place.

My other photo here is up to two feet of snow from a Nor'Easter on January 12. What variety, and I'll be skiing on it, I hope, in the Mad River Valley, VT this weekend. It's the spice of life.

Now to the probiotics bit of this post. The addition of probiotics in your diet might substantially reduce upper respiratory infections for winter athletes, and others, according to a recently published study in the International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism.

First, what are probiotics? "Probiotics are food supplements that contain live microorganisms that, when administered in adequate amounts, confer a health benefit on the host." I'll also let the study speak for itself in terms of study description and conclusions.

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of a probiotic supplement during 4 mo of winter training in men and women engaged in endurance-based physical activities on incidence of upper respiratory-tract infections (URTIs) and immune markers. Eighty-four highly active individuals were randomized to probiotic (n = 42) or placebo (n = 42) groups and, under double-blind procedures, received probiotic (PRO: Lactobacillus casei Shirota [LcS]) or placebo (PLA) daily for 16 wk.

Resting blood and saliva samples were collected at baseline and after 8 and 16 wk. Weekly training and illness logs were kept. Fifty-eight subjects completed the study (n = 32 PRO, n = 26 PLA). The proportion of subjects on PLA who experienced 1 or more weeks with URTI symptoms was 36% higher than those on PRO (PLA 0.90, PRO 0.66; p = .021).

The number of URTI episodes was significantly higher (p < .01) in the PLA group (2.1 ± 1.2) than in the PRO group (1.2 ± 1.0). Severity and duration of symptoms were not significantly different between treatments. Saliva IgA concentration was higher on PRO than PLA, significant treatment effect F(1, 54) = 5.1, p = .03; this difference was not evident at baseline but was significant after 8 and 16 wk of supplementation.

Regular ingestion of LcS appears to be beneficial in reducing the frequency of URTI in an athletic cohort, which may be related to better maintenance of saliva IgA levels during a winter period of training and competition.

One statistic that jumped out at me was that of the 26 athletes that received a placebo (i.e., they were not getting probiotics) and finished the study, 18 of them on average were sick each week of the study. Wow, endurance training really does suppress the immune system. The probiotics seemed to also help with gastrointestinal symptoms among the athletes, according to the study.

Examples of probiotics you can take are yogurt, such as full-fat Greek yogurt, and a pill-form supplement such as Floragen-3 (I have no affiliation with them). I have taken this off and on all year, and I think it works (I don't get sick very much, although I'm very active).

A probiotic supplement is definitely worth a try.

Teamwork In The Backcountry, And Eating Within A Tight Budget

2011-01-01T17:10:00.000-08:00

I have two distinctly different subjects, which I've decided, simply because they're topical, to jam together in one post. The first is the importance of staying together in the backcountry while hiking or skiing, a topic I pick up somewhat in this week's column that I will I write for the Valley Reporter in Vermont.

In British Columbia on December 22, a snowboarder lost her life by suffocating in deep snow. The snowboarder was on a guided cat-skiing tour about 20 kilometers west of Kaslo, B.C., according to this press report. The news stories never have the complete story, but she and her boyfriend decided to take a different route among 12 skiers and gliders. She hit a dip on the slope, spun around backwards, and went headfirst into deep snow, which she could not extricate herself from.

A "tail guide" they had (along with a lead guide) failed to see where she went down. After she never showed up, they found her by the transceiver she was wearing, but it was too late to revive her with CPR.

This seems to be a split up in the backcountry issue, which you should never do. The probability is that another skier nearby could have easily dug her out. They were not caught in an avalanche (which is also largely preventable with equal parts training and precaution). This story represents a tragic failure of tactics in the backcountry, and applies to people skiing in deep snow in the trees too. Stay together, and have a workable plan that everyone knows if you do get separated!

Do The Impoverished Have Food Choices?

Too many articles like the latter in Newsweek and elsewhere imply that people with lower incomes are by definition prevented from eating nutritious foods. So I'm going to take an off-the-cuff, imprecise shot at this topic. Meaning, I have not undertaken a study on how to eat well on, for example, food stamps.

Here is how I would do it. I would buy filling, healthy, high-caloric foods, like eggs, whole milk, carrots, sweet potatoes or yams, red onions, then go to the local butcher. I would buy as much meat as I could afford, and acquire beef or turkey bones to make broth or soup. Put everything into the same pot and make a big, whole foods stew that lasts all day.

Buy a bag of apples at the local farmer's market. Buy long-lasting bags of coconut- and/or almond flour with chunks of butter to make a Paleo-style bread.

Buy a big sack of rice and soak it for 24 hours to help remove the phytic acid, an "antinutrient." The rice isn't very healthy because it is insulinogenic, along with the antinutrients, but as a compromise it could be used as a carbohydrate "filler" if necessary (if you cannot afford enough veggies like avocados or fruits to fill you up).

Eat canned tuna, salmon, sardines, or any other fish you can afford for the healthy fats and protein.

A bag of carrots or yams goes a long way, and there have to be hundreds of different places to get even pastured eggs. A bag of healthy nuts like raw almonds or walnuts also goes a long way. The chips, sugary soda, pasta, and cheap loaves of factory bread don't even have to enter the picture.

Train yourself to eat twice a day, or within a narrow window, forgoing most snacks. I do this most of the time; it's not impossible. I would welcome any other suggestions, because this is much debated over issue!

A Nice Way to Spend Xmas Eve, On Snow

2010-12-24T13:11:00.000-08:00

Sunny, Crisp, 20 degrees F., wind chill maybe below zero on the 4,083 ft. summit of Mt. Ellen in VT. This is the north side of the Sugarbush ski resort in Warren, VT. I froze my bare hands a bit taking these pictures from there: the first, of the Champlain Valley and the Adirondack mountains in the distance, the second of Scott on the summit, ready to descend an aptly named trail called Panorama.

It was a memorable day skiing on Xmas Eve with my 7-year-old son.

We skied about 4.5 hours, some of them hard narrow black-diamond trails with a few ski-breaking rocks, other trails beautiful wide open "cruisers" with nice powdery sections along the sides.

We went inside a couple of times to warm up Scott's hands. I ate bad food (a little sugary hot chocolate and white bread on a chicken sandwich), which seems more justifiable when you're outside exercising in the cold all day. A temporary relapse. I figure in 4.5 hours of skiing at around zero wind chill (but wind chill is exaggerated, eh?) you burn at least 2000 extra calories.

Have an enjoyable and healthy holiday!

Ancestral Health Symposium Set For August 5-6, 2011

2010-12-04T04:28:00.000-08:00

A meeting of virtually all of the leading lights in the Ancestral Health or "paleo" movement will take place in Southern California on the UCLA campus on August 5-6, 2011. The meeting is the brainchild of the Ancestral Health Society, "a nonprofit organization dedicated to educating healthcare professionals and laypersons on ancestral lifestyle dynamics."

Any member of the public can buy a ticket and sit in on the presentations for the two-day meeting, which will charge $100 for admission. I suspect the focus of the presentations will be nutrition, exercise/training, and medical issues from an evolutionary-health perspective. Meaning, many of the clues to staying healthy and avoiding chronic diseases probably lie in our "hunter gatherer" based evolutionary heritage.

Pale Arguments Vs. Paleo

2010-11-27T12:01:00.000-08:00

Once in a while I'll encounter a mainstream article aiming to bludgeon the "Paleo" diet, like this one. Paleo, by the way, stands for Paleolithic, and it represents more of a lifestyle regimen than a dietary fad, including heavy-lifting type exercise, lots of sun, and sleep. The regimen is based on a reasonable approximation, not actual reenactment, of how our ancestors lived, our evolutionary heritage. Here's a Paleo In Brief article, for a little background.

As soon as they start calling it the "caveman" diet, you know we're in trouble. We're encountering some snarky, adolescent kind of pigeon-holing. It's a bit like saying, anyone who advocates resistance training with weights must be like one of the tattooed roid-rage guys at the gym. Attack a concept by characterizing it from its most distorted angle.

Let's lob back a few counterpoints, bit by bit:

The article uses the shopworn argument that Paleolithic peoples didn't live long enough to succumb to chronic disease. As the author of "The Black Swan" has pointed out, this is an invalid view of statistics, as many Paleolithic people no doubt died in childhood from accidents, infant mortality, infections, and predation (remember, there were no ERs or hospitals), and that those who survived that initial gauntlet could have impressive healthy longevity given their resources of say 70-80 years. The 30-year life expectancy that is so often attributed to Paleolithic humans is more of an average between two extremes. In other words, it wasn't as if a Paleolithic denizen reached 30 and declared "it's a good day to die!"

How long do you think the typical American would live without ERs and hospitals?

Further, a lot of the scientific basis of Paleo is based on anthropological evidence gathered on modern hunter-gatherer peoples, who do not stay all day in cubicles eating donuts and are much healthier than we are. Until they are assimilated into modern Western society.

Unless you're "orthodox" Paleo, dairy is widely consumed (by me, for instance), including pastured eggs, cheeses, full-fat yogurt, etc.

The lack of affordability claim has already been refuted in detail, as many people have provided proof of being able to avoid sugar, refined flour, and processed foods in general on a modest budget. Besides, the "agricultural industrial complex" has generated deep dysfunctions in our food supply. It has artificially made junk food like corn oil and high fructose corn syrup much cheaper than real food. The result is that impoverished people in the U.S. end up trying to subsist on a glorified form of maize. Educating people about what is real food vs. a "manufactured item" that will probably make you sick, is obviously very important.

The claim that we cannot make a reasonable attempt to strengthen ourselves to the level of Paleolithic people is simply absurd. Modern Westerners already exercise daily more than a typical hunter gatherer, with generally mediocre results.

As for questions about whether "meat was indeed the primary source of fuels during the Paleolithic era," a human from this era no doubt ate whatever they could get their hands on, including scavenged meat and bones, fruits, root vegetables, nuts, wild honey, etc. However, we do not eat meat because we are human, we are human because we ate meat. Nothing else can explain the rapid growth of our brains as we evolved compared with other species, except for the finding of very energy dense foods.

Enough said, eh?

Alpine Skiing: First Turns For 2010-11

2010-11-26T07:19:00.000-08:00

I skied for about three hours yesterday, thanks(giving) to the Sugarbush ski area's heroic recovery from a virtual meltdown the previous Tuesday. Only the upper mountain and one trail from the summit was open, so I had a handful of nice long fast runs in the cool air. I felt really strong for the first day, and I attribute that to adrenaline and a strength-oriented off-season training regimen. Lots of hiking, leg presses, and squats.

I wondered whether I'd feel different, because I'd put on about five to six pounds, mostly muscle, compared with last year (I'm all the way up to 146 pounds). I was pleasantly surprised to feel as good as I did at the end of the season last year. It's always a nice feeling to have your pre-season strategy work-out reasonably, as planned. In sum, anything that legitimately strengthens the large motor units of the upper leg, like short hard sprinting (Tabata sprints), the leg press machine, back squats (judiciously done so as to not damage the lumbar region of the spine!), and steep hiking will help make you strong for alpine skiing.

When Going Outside Beats The Gym

2010-11-15T03:44:00.000-08:00

I took another Fall weather hike/climb on 4,083 foot Mount Ellen in Vermont on Sunday, November 14. The mountain still had snow on it, but roughly half that needed for skiing. That didn't dissuade two groups of hikers with snowboards and skis on their backs. I say "hike/climb" because, while it was just walking, the top of the mountain was partly coated in ice, and I could have used tools such as crampons and an ice axe for a steep rocky slope that I went up beneath the top.

It took me about 1:45 to hike the 2600 feet vertical from the parking lot at the ski area, so 1,500 feet per hour is a good pace.

It was as if the top of the mountain had been polished by the wind at night, like a giant white cueball. It would not have been pleasant or particularly safe trying to ski that, to say the least.

That last part, what I would call a pseudo-Alpine climb because of the steepness and ice, turned out to be a great training regimen. It forced me into awkward, slippery positions with just hiking boots and trekking poles. The climb tested balance and power, and required short maximum efforts, with implications (ouch!) if I failed to keep a purchase on the slope. You cannot simulate these efforts in a gym. That's why it is best to go outside!

Fueling Up For Winter, Including Copious, Quality Protein

2010-11-13T13:39:00.000-08:00

It is 66 degrees in the sun now in Vermont, so we bid farewell to the October snows for the time being. Within a week or so, around Thanksgiving, it'll be in the 20s at night. After that we'll be launched into the depths of winter, when there will be many Arctic nights at the tops of ridges and ski areas.

My family members, all but me, got whacked by a stomach bug last week. My 7-year-old son thus got really skinny, shrinking from kind of a little surfer dude's physique. He's just getting loaded up with calories now. It doesn't matter what he eats, even sugary and floury stuff like pancakes and pizza (which at least has dairy protein) get a temporary pass. I'd rather see him eat rich, quality protein and fat sources like fish, red meat, chicken, avocados, eggs (he doesn't eat enough of three of those right now). He just needs to gain the weight back. I'll pull back a bit on the dietary controls, for a day. Manga! There is an analogy here with eating in the cold.

I'll start my winter hikes and skis soon. The caloric expenditure is large because your body is trying to stay warm, along with the exercise (shivering is a mechanism by which muscle contractions generate core heat). Those contractions burn a lot of calories over time. Therefore, people who work, exercise, or both in the cold should just plain eat a lot, especially quality protein and fats. Fats are a better choice for snacks in the cold, being high calorie, 9 calories per gram: cheese, nuts, high-cacao chocolate. I'll bring all of those in a pouch to the mountains, along with good protein sources like hunks of chicken or turkey. If you were really well-organized, a thermos full of a whey-protein shake stuffed in your pack would be excellent in a cold climate.

Cold weather exercise, while healthy, is catabolic. Long days in the cold will burn your lean body mass for energy, so you have to eat a lot of protein to keep your body in a "positive protein balance," and healthy fats to spare or restrict the harvesting of the body's tissue as a fuel source.

A recently published study review from the journal Nutrition & Metabolism points once again to the efficacy of whey protein as a muscle-building and -sparing supplement.

The amino acid leucine, which whey contains, seems to be a key constituent for building muscle, according to the review.

Leucine, acting as a signaling molecule in the mTOR cascade [61,120], has been shown to be a critical amino acid for increasing skeletal muscle protein synthesis ...Leucine may also be involved in suppressing muscle protein degradation.

Further, This is a really good table or chart for determining the highest quality food sources for retaining and building lean mass. Look at what a good source of leucine and branched chain amino acids (BCAAs) eggs are. A good pastured egg is a nutritional powerhouse. Also, it is not difficult to find a quality whey-based protein powder to use in shakes.

Paleolithic People May Have Ground Up a Few Grains For A Meal

2010-10-23T13:57:00.000-07:00

An article in Deutsche Welle suggests that some Paleolithic people chewed, rather than eschewed, some ground-up carbs.

A study published on Monday in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reports that traces of grains found on 30,000-year-old Paleolithic-era grinding stones are proof that early humans did not rely as heavily on meat as a source of energy and nutrition as previously thought.

The study also pushes back the earliest known date when humans were processing plant foods by approximately 10,000 years.

Then again, maybe they used the paste to fill the cracks in the walls?

You Are What Your Dad Ate, Research Suggests

2010-10-21T05:09:00.000-07:00

Some researchers in Australia think they have found an epigenetic link between a father's poor diet and subsequent metabolic problems in their daughters, according to an October 2010 article in the journal Nature.

In the study, the researchers fed rats (the "fathers") a diet that was designed to make them obese. A control group of rats were not made obese. They then studied the offspring of the two groups of fathers, and found that the daughters of the male obese rats were born with cellular dysfunctions in the pancreatic β-cells, which are central to insulin and weight control. The father had passed the acquired obesity on to the daughters (note the "acquired" part).

Epigenetics refers to a vast layer of cell signaling that exists above the genes ("epi" being the Greek for "above"). Environmental triggers or lifestyle factors can thus positively or negatively express, or "turn on or off," your genes. The DNA sequence remains unchanged, but the "behavior" of the gene changes, and these changes can apparently be passed on. Yikes! That's a rather astounding concept and finding.

The genes are the words and the epigenome is the grammar, as one scientist put it.

From the naturenews site:

Glucose levels in the body are controlled by insulin, produced by groups of β-cells in the pancreas. These cells group to form 'islets'. The team noticed that in the daughters of fat fathers, these islets had shrunk, compared with those of the control daughters.

The next step was to investigate what was causing these changes. The daughters of the obese male rats showed an altered expression of more than 600 pancreatic islet genes. But because the DNA code itself remained unchanged, Morris's team suggest that the changes in gene expression are epigenetic.

The researchers found the greatest difference in expression in a gene called Il13ra2. A gene's expression can be altered by methylation, in which methyl groups are added to the DNA, effectively 'silencing' the gene. But in the daughters of obese fathers, the level of methylation of this gene was around 25% of the level seen in the control daughters.

Studying the "epigenome" is a giant and important area of research. Epigenetics suggests that it matters less what genes you're born with than the positive expression of those genes with environmental cues, meaning your fitness routine, diet, and stress levels.

Winter's Arrival At Higher Terrain

2010-10-19T14:12:00.000-07:00

It's always a good idea not to do the same types of fitness routines repetitively. Mix them up, then rest. Randomness is the spice of life (or one of them), and you don't want to train your body to expect the same set of static, linear resistance exercises or cardio routines each time you venture out to exercise. I cannot point right now to specific studies, but it seems intuitive that you increase fitness by violating the boundaries to which your body has adapted. You force the body to continually readapt.

I'm lucky enough to have access to both mountains and ocean. These types of terrains offer limitless possibilities for stimulating new adaptations, if not opening your mind. Just get out alone, if no one else is around, and do something.

Vermont received the remnants of a tropical storm on Friday October 15 and parts of Saturday, dumping more than a foot of snow on the higher terrain of the Green Mountains, above about 3,000 feet or 914 meters. I hiked up to the ridge at Sugarbush in Warren on Sunday, clomping inside of a cloud almost knee-deep through the snow. It was very skiable, and a few backcountry skiers, booting up with skis and boots in backpacks, were taking advantage of a Fall-season snowfall.

Back country skiing provides a unique and pristine opportunity to "earn" your run down the slope, by having a nice, steep, fairly strenuous hike first. I'm gradually gathering the equipment, so I can start doing it. The snow made it easier coming down on Sunday, as I did a modified shush in hiking boots.

On Monday I was over on Plum Island in Newburyport, MA in the morning, where it was a sunny 54 degrees. I took a short walk/sprint on the beach, sprinting barefoot four or five times as hard as I could in the sand for about 50 to 100 yards. A great combination!

A NatMov-Like Take On Skiing

2010-10-15T08:05:00.000-07:00

Think the "fluidity of natural motion" and let it all hang out. Or better yet, don't think. This video, featuring extreme skier extraordinaire Jon Egan, discusses fluidity and the harnessing of the instincts we share with our four-legged friends for skiing the woods. He uses the example of his dog, who would never think of where his paws are landing, running through the woods. It's a wise and intuitive philosophy of athletic technique that reminds me a lot of NatMov. The recent flood in the Mad River Valley, Vermont, plays a supporting role.

I'm not going to embed the video because it is too wide for my column. View it here.

The Kids Are Alright, Outside

2010-10-12T07:00:00.000-07:00

Let kids go outside, and good things tend to happen. Health is bound to follow. This weekend, seven-year-old Scott spent several hours in Vermont's Green Mountains at Sugarbush inhaling (and exhaling of course) the cool crisp Fall air, and generally just having a blast. First, he spent about 90 minutes in the inflatable kid's funhouse, which is the equivalent of doing continuous intervals and acrobatics, if we adults were in there.

Then we both got on the lift (they're running one lift here for downhill mountainbikers and others) to experience a little pre-winter weather and get some hiking in. The temperature was perhaps in the thirties up there. We started walking over to the south side of the mountain to descend through the woods, when Scott said "I want to go down Stein's Run." This is a legendary steep trail at Sugarbush.

No moguls yet on October 10th, but it's still a hard descent (particularly on 50+ year old knees). We descended through mowed fields and mossy birch glades, collecting birch bark for the big fire I made later. It took us about an hour. Once in a while a muddy rider would emerge from the woods and bounce past us, like on cobblestones in the Tour De France. Not a bad way to spend a Fall day.

The previous weekend represented more of the same. Scott did an "adventure camp" day with extreme skiing legend John Egan, who's really opened up all the faces and nooks and crags of the mountain in an all-season fashion for the Sugarbush visitors. They hiked up to Lincoln Peak then did the Long Trail south for a bit. I met them coming the other way on the Trail, and we descended from the ridge together.

Last but not least, on October 11 Scott and I hiked through the woods on Mt. Ellen, crossed a creek by building a bridge, surrounded by peaceful and photogenic foliage, then made our way down to the lodge area. Just playing in the woods basically, a Zen experience in Mother Nature. All American kids could use more of this activity, and less of ... well you fill in the blanks.

BCAAs Help Counteract Aging, Increase Endurance, Study Suggests

2010-10-08T09:13:00.000-07:00

Longterm branched chain amino acid (BCAA) supplementation had a substantive effect on prolonging lifespan in mice and increasing endurance, according to a study discussed in the journal Cell Metabolism.

The study supplemented mice with the BCAAs isoleucine, leucine, and valine, three of those essential amino acids we talked about. The mice who got the super smoothies had a 12 percent increased lifespan compared with the non-supplemented ones. The dietary change increased the mitochondria in cardiac and skeletal muscle, expressed a gene called SIRT 1 that is linked with extending life, and "enhanced physical endurance."

Mitochondria are the "power plants" inside of cells that convert fuel like glucose into ATP, the body's primary energy currency, the "gas" we run on.

The study authors were looking for anti-aging strategies other than caloric restriction, which is not practical for most older people (it can promote muscle wasting). Resistance training anyone?

"Moreover, the reactive oxygen species (ROS) defense-system genes were upregulated," according to the study, and the amino-acid enriched mice had lower ROS production. This means that the critters' natural cellular defense against oxidative damage was enhanced, and fewer ROS, the rogue molecules that are behind aging and disease, were generated.

Ever noticed how the fleshy part of an apple will turn brown when exposed to the air? That's an example of oxidative damage caused by ROS, which can be increased in humans by excess exercise and a poor diet, among other stresses.

Pretty powerful results, even if they are just mice. The BCAA supplements also "improved ... endurance capacity" and motor coordination, according to the article.

Another interesting take-away from this study is that the beneficial effects were promoted solely by diet. The supplemented mice didn't receive any extra exercise (which obviously would have been a confounding factor).

Indoor Climbing Gyms: Great Option For Rainy Days

2010-09-28T07:35:00.000-07:00

I took my son Scott over to MetroRock in Newburyport for a climbing lesson. Nice facility. I had always poo-pooed indoor climbing as the "weak sister" of climbing on a real mountain or rock. But this is a great workout, and you can literally learn the ropes, as they will provide instruction on tying into a seat harness and belaying.

I bought a day pass during Scott's lesson, and jumped into the bouldering. It's *hard.* This is climbing on walls with mats beneath you, but not supported by ropes. You cling to the little knobbed appendages protruding from the wall. Gravity is generally working against you. While it may not be very much like a real rock wall (where cracks provide at least 50 percent of the paths along a wall, I would guess), you have the same goal: get to the top. And the climbing exerts a tremendous strengthening influence on joints and numerous muscle groups, from the big leg muscles to the tips of your fingers.

The gym has places to do pull-ups, kettle bells, and other strengthening exercises too.

There are literally no short-cuts on this activity. If your body has weak links, they will be exposed immediately. Yet, it's not hardcore; you just choose easier routes and work your way up. I saw fantastic small female kids mastering some of the bouldering routes that were challenging me (they have a "V" classification system for bouldering, called the "V" scale, as in V0-16, with the difficulty increasing with the higher number). It isn't that hard for us older athletes. Try it! And more later...

Analyzing Amino Acids In Food

2010-09-27T09:27:00.000-07:00

I've discussed the big picture for the essential amino acids, but the information doesn't really stick until you see how AA manifest themselves in food. Turn to the useful tool nutritiondata.com and punch in whatever food you are interested in.

Search on the food you want to analyze, like salmon (in this case, "Atlantic salmon, cooked, dry heat"). The results present you with the nutritional content of a 154-gram hunk of fish, about a 6-ounce filet.

Scroll down to the Protein & Amino Acids box, and expand the box by clicking on the More Details widget. Here you get a long list of the amino acids and the grams of each in your sample piece of salmon (see the image), which had more than 39 grams of protein. That's a very good protein source for one food serving.
Whereas only a health or nutrition geek would love to drill down into these numbers, they tend to gain more relevance when compared with other nutritious foods, like avocados or eggs. Besides, we already knew salmon was a good protein source, didn't we?

We talked about leucine as being an important amino acid for building muscle mass. This piece of fish has 3183 mg of it, or about 3.2 grams. Is that a lot? For example, this study on protein supplements used 6.2 grams of leucine as the daily supplemented amount, so getting about half that in one serving of a natural food matrix seems good. In fact, salmon may be a better way to get leucine than trying to soak up all the amino acids in a synthesized powder.

What about an avocado from California? How good a source of amino acids for vegetarians? It turns out to be very good for a vegetable; it provides all of the essential AA (technically, an avocado is a very large berry or fruit). However, the amounts of amino acids are low, compared with our salmon hunk. This is because the avie only contains 4.5 grams total of protein so its leucine content is one tenth that of the salmon.

A female athlete, depending on her size and lean body mass, might want to get from 90-100 grams of protein per day. So the avocado only provided about one twentieth that amount, even though all the essential AA are present in the food.

What about augmenting the avie with two eggs, hopefully pastured. We'll search on one whole egg ("egg, whole, cooked, scrambled"), then double the results.

Two large eggs contain about 14 grams of protein, and all of the essential amino acids. Leucine comes in a larger amount per egg than an avie, for example, 582 mg, so you get about 1.2 grams of leucine from the two scrambled eggs. A good protein source, and getting closer in quality to the salmon piece.

What Are Amino Acids?

2010-09-22T07:51:00.001-07:00

This post is the first of a series on nutrition building blocks, since we toss around these terms so loosely these days, with much uncertainty about their definitions. This description will proceed at a high level, since you can drill down into the biochemistry infinitely, which can make a post hard to grasp for us readers.

An amino acid is the building block of protein, the primary structural molecule of the body. We'd obviously be lost without protein in the diet and as a bodily substance.

Skeletal muscle (incorporating proteins called myosin and actin), bones (containing about one-fifth collagen), tendons (collagen), organ tissue, skin, and hair (keratin) use "structural" proteins.

Examples of the "do important stuff" functional proteins are enzymes (the managers or overseers of the body's chemical reactions), some hormones (e.g., growth hormone and insulin), red- and white blood cells, and immune-system molecules. The image below shows hemoglobin, a protein complex in red blood cells that carries oxygen throughout the body.

Imagine an amino acid as a Lego piece made up of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen atoms. Fit this Lego piece together with other Legos to make a new structure, a protein.

Here are the 20 AA. Ten essential amino acids, which must be obtained in food because the body cannot synthesize them, are in bold type. They must be obtained in the diet in adequate amounts most days, or particular proteins cannot be assembled (other than fasting days, of course) ¹.

Amino Acids ("essential" in bold)

Alanine

Glycine

Valine

Leucine

Isoleucine

Methionine

Phenylalanine (Tyrosine)

Trytophan

Proline

Serine

Threonine

Cysteine

Tyrosine

Asparagine

Glutamine

Aspartic acid

Glutamic acid

Lysine

Arginine (for infants)

Histidine (for infants)

The 20 amino acids in the body, like letters of an alphabet, can be combined into thousands of different types of proteins ². When building the Lego structure, you have to first know which pieces to use (the amino acids), then the order in which to stick them together (the "sequence"). A gene is a recipe for a protein, and the DNA sequence determines the sequence of amino acids.

Some nomenclature that might stick in your mind: ten or more amino acids stuck together form a polypeptide (and two are a dipeptide and three a tripeptide) ³. Any polypeptide with more than 50 amino acids (AA) is called a protein, which can be composed of as many as 10,000 AAs ⁴.

Proteins, these big collections of amino acids bonded together, often fold upon themselves to form convoluted shapes, so that macrame is perhaps a better metaphor than Legos. The hemoglobin molecule, for example, is composed of four linked polypeptides, which altogether comprise 572 amino acid molecules bonded together in a enmeshed ribbon shape (see the image). Hemoglobin is about one-third the mass of a red blood cell, and transports oxygen throughout the body.

Where exactly do amino acids fit in the dietary realm?

Protein is one of the three macronutrients in food, the other two being fats and carbohydrate. When you eat protein, certain digestive enzymes cleave the bonds between the linked amino acids (AA), pulling apart the Lego connections. The liberated AA can be used for energy, assembled into new proteins, or if necessary stored as fat.

The branched-chain amino acids are leucine, valine, and isoleucine. These are essential AA that can be used as energy sources and substrates in muscle cells (most AA are processed for energy in the liver). Leucine plays an active role in muscle protein synthesis, which is why it is prized as a supplement by body builders, as well as by anyone else who wants to grow muscle (such as someone who has had a muscle-wasting condition).

So how do you know whether you're getting all the essential amino acids? The next article will show a way to analyze a food type to determine its amino-acid content, beginning with the venerable salmon and avocado.

¹ Human Anatomy & Physiology, Seventh Edition, Marieb, etal., p.946

² Human Anatomy & Physiology, Seventh Edition, Marieb, etal., p.49

³ Human Anatomy & Physiology, Seventh Edition, Marieb, etal., p.49

⁴ Human Anatomy & Physiology, Seventh Edition, Marieb, etal., p.49

A Bit More On Whey Protein and Leucine Supplementation

2010-09-17T14:52:00.000-07:00

I examined in more detail the recent study on whey protein and leucine supplementation that I wrote about this week.

A couple of points should be noted. The athletes on the supplement (the study calls them WPL) didn't improve by *that* much in eight weeks compared with their placebo cohorts, who instead of receiving 19.7 grams per day of whey protein and 6.2 grams leucine received about 100 calories of carbohydrates.

In eight weeks, the bench presses among the WPL group increased by an average 7.7 pounds (pretty good), compared with almost three pounds for the placebo group. Almost 60 percent of the protein-supplement group improved the bench press by more than five percent, the equivalent of going from 170 pounds on the bench to more than 178.5 pounds. Still, the average of 7.7 represents less than a pound per week in improvement.

The WPL group only improved by 5.4 push-ups, compared with 3.3 push-ups for the placebo. So not much difference there (even though it's considered statistically significant). Same with the crunches (up by an average of 3.2 compared with 1.6 for the placebo). Then again, considering that most of the 30 participants were male US Air Force people, they'd probably already done tons of push-ups and crunches, so there was a narrow window for improvement.

There was very little improvement in chin-ups for the WPL, 10%, meaning that they could do about 10 chin-ups at week 1, and 11 chin-ups at week 8.

There wasn't any significant improvement in sprinting or the three-mile-run on the supplements (just 30 seconds for the latter). Another thing jumped out at me. These guys had very high body fat for young guys in the USAF; almost 27 percent on average for the WPL, compared with about 19 in the placebo (the random selection process for the WPL group just happened to choose very heavy guys). If these were young guys training for eight weeks, then they appeared to be doing the wrong kind of weight lifting, or eating tons of spaghetti and ice cream every day (or both)!

This was a randomized, double-blind study, meaning that the athletes were allocated randomly to each group, and neither the people conducting the study nor the athletes knew whether each individual was receiving protein or the placebo. These aspects are hallmarks of a well-run study.

The only thing I can conclude from this study is that the whey and leucine supplements might improve your bench press, or perhaps have a greater effect on larger muscle groups. The study may have needed to include more subjects, have lasted longer, and tested people who began with a lower strength baseline (they hadn't done a lot of resistance training before).

A Boost For Supplementing With Whey Protein and Leucine

2010-09-16T11:43:00.000-07:00

The athletes that received whey protein and leucine supplements in a study showed a significant performance boost compared with a placebo, according to the International Journal of Sport Nutrition & Exercise Metabolism.

Thirty athletes received 19.7 grams per day whey protein and 6.2 grams leucine, or a calorie-equivalent placebo (carbs), for eight weeks. They gave them "a modified Air Force fitness test," a cognition test, and a body scan. The supplemented athletes did much better in push-ups and the bench press then the subjects receiving no supplement. "Total mass, fat-free mass, and lean body mass all increased significantly in the (whey-protein-leucine) group but showed no change in the (placebo) group."

Leucine, an amino acid (a building block of protein), and whey protein, a byproduct of cheese that also contains essential amino acids, are a popular supplement combination among body-builders.

Some of the other parameters showed no differences between the two groups, such as a three-mile-run test and a battery of cognition tests. Although I do not now take a protein supplement, I plan on looking into this study further, and I'll post my research on the available whey and Leucine supplements. It might be a good idea to do my own test.

Mt. Whitney, Mountaineer's Route, September 10, 2010

2010-09-14T13:27:00.000-07:00

This is my longwinded climbing account of the Mt. Whitney Mountaineer's Route (MR) in the Sierra Nevada, CA. I used a lot of my partner Peter Reed's great pictures here.

Mt. Whitney is the highest mountain in the lower 48 states, recently recalculated to 14,505 ft., or 4,421 meters. Thus, this was the highest I've ever been on a mountain, since when I did the easier route on Whitney ten years ago it was listed at 14,497 (a technicality, I know). The MR is an alternative route that is much shorter and more technical than the normal route or Mt. Whitney Trail. I did the MR with Braden, a guide from Bishop, CA, and Peter.

We started out at 4:30 am after working out some strategic and equipment issues, at the Whitney Portal trailhead, 8,400 feet or 2,560 meters. We had headlamps on for the first 90 minutes or so, which included a tricky part called the Ebersbacher Ledges. This part involves fairly simple scrambling up a canyon wall, but is very exposed in sections. Some background is necessary here.

I tried the MR with a freind and no guide two years ago, and we made a game try to 12,500 ft., including getting lost and running into bad weather. The route-finding adds a difficult dimension to this physically demanding day-climb, so I decided to get a guide this time. I'm not local to the mountain, so I cannot go up there on the weekends and scope it out. Lots of people get in trouble right off the bat in ascending the Ledges, and there have been several fatalities.

The MR is like ascending large geological steps. The Ledges ascend to Lower Boyscout Lake, which is step one. Then Upper Boyscout Lake is the next "plate," with the final step being Iceberg Lake at 12,500 feet. The trail wound nicely up to each step, under a bright Sierra sun and arid, perfect weather. I was carrying at least seven pounds of water (3.5 liters), but Braden knew of a stream lower down that was clean enough for a direct refill (I didn't need the disinfectant tablets I was carrying). I constantly drank water, for obvious reasons, to avoid dehydration and help stave off acute mountain sickness. I acclimated only during the last 48 hours.

Braden was setting a very fast pace, the reason for which became apparent later. Nothing technical, short breaks, and we were all the way to Iceberg Lake, the final step, by 8:30 am. 4000+ freet in four hours. What a pace, I thought. Braden's mood really seemed to lift, as I assumed the pace was designed to see if we were ready. How's a guide supposed to know, when it's just two 50+ Americans rolling off a plane from the East Coast?

He went off to fetch some stuff from a cache his company keeps on the mountain. We ate, took pictures, chatted. The East Face of Whitney loomed above us. Up walked a dog with a "dog pack," and a woman who looked like Angelina Jolie, lugging about 80 pounds on her back. It turns out she was a porter working for a guiding company (most people camp below before finishing the MR). Peter looked at me and remarked, "when you said, 'here comes a dog,' I got the wrong impression."

We refilled our own water bottles from a big bag of water and filter that Braden came back with. Here is where the MR "really starts." We put on helmets. The route continues up a gully or couloir, north of the East Face, for about 1,600 feet, ending at the "notch," which is at about 14,100 (see the image, gully.jpeg).

In the Summer, the steep gully is a merciless porridge of large stones, loose rock, scree, and sand. You have to do some hard scrambling just to get into the gully, then it's the physically hardest part of the day, I thought. In the winter you need crampons and an ice axe, but the going is much pleasanter.

Halfway up the gully, Braden stopped us for a pep talk. He said that he was really surprised that we had been able to go this fast, and that his doubts when we set up this trip were gone (they call doing the whole thing without camping an "extreme day.") He said our climb was the second fastest of his guided MRs. What a panacea for these fragile middle-aged egos.

It turns out that he had bad experiences on two recent guided MRs, so that's why he was demanding we get to the summit well before noon. One of the trips he took a man down from 12,000 feet with a broken ankle, arriving back at midnight (we still don't know how he accomplished that through the Ledges on the way down). Heroic. Then a man he was with before that had a heart attack. So he told those stories and we just kept going to the notch.

I always thought the notch would be a windy, narrow place, but it turned out that day to be a bigger area with nice weather. We started chowing down our lunch. I had had a Bayer earlier, since I had a low-grade headache, but that was gone and I felt much better than I did at 12,000. Peter was doing great too. All that was left was a 400 foot section of Class IV climbing called "the chute," for which we would use a rope. We put on seat harnesses, and roped up in a Braden-Peter-Bruce configuration.

The first move was the hardest, and the next 30 minutes was very challenging but safe. Peter said he loved the roped section. I was thinking, "I'm at 100 percent of effort or beyond." Still, finding hand- and footholds was a distraction and went by fast. I knew the summit plateau was right above us, we were with a young guide who was twice the climber we were, and that I will have finally climbed the MR. It felt good to use mostly upper body, since our legs were pounded.

We were about 80 percent of the way up, when Braden said to me something like, "I took you through some Class V just for some extra spice." I thought, "you mean, you made the chute harder than it had to be?" I now appreciate the extra challenge; a man half my age teaching me a lesson. Oh well, now I can say I climbed Class V near Whitney's summit. (Class I is easy hiking or walking; Class II is steep hiking or walking; Class III is hand over hand climbing that doesn't need a rope, and then the classifications just get harder and require ropes).

Finally, we pulled up on to a table and had an ecstatic walk up to the summit proper. Braden promptly lay down, put his helmet over his face, and fell asleep. We ate, took pictures, talked to everyone else who had just done the normal route. One group of youngsters who we had passed in the gully (they had camped below that night), came right up behind us. They had done the MR and impressively free-climbed the chute.

We got a second wind, descended the chute, and had a lot of fun on the rope. We made it back to the car after 13.5 hours total, and the beers certainly tasted great!

Thanks for reading this far.

Great MR Climb On Mount Whitney

2010-09-13T11:42:00.001-07:00

I just returned from climbing the Mountaineer's Route (MR) on Mount Whitney in the Sierra Nevada. I've got that "cloud 9" feeling you get when you've reached your goal on a big mountain. We had a guide from Bishop, CA. I'll write a longer post with my own pictures in an upcoming post.

We started the MR at 4:30 AM with headlamps at the Whitney Portal trailhead (about 8400 feet above sea level), and climbed up on to the summit plateau (14,505 ft.) at about 11:15. According to our guide, that was a very fast time. He had pushed the pace a bit, for reasons I'll explain in the longer description.

Does Paleo exercise and diet work? It does for me. I've been doing it for about 20 months. Let's compare my two climbs on Whitney. Ten years ago I hiked the normal or "trail" route on Whitney, when I was 43. This time I took a much harder route, hiked faster, felt stronger, and have much lower body fat at age 53. Ninety-nine percent of my preparation consisted of lifting weights and hiking in Vermont, whereas last time I ran too much. My acclimatization for both hikes, regrettably, was inadequate, and each time I got a few low-grade headaches.

In Praise Of High Intensity Training

2010-09-05T11:04:00.000-07:00

Taking nothing away from a long pedal through the countryside with friends, high-intensity training (HIT), or high-intensity resistance training (HIRT) tends to give you more bang for the buck from a time and biological standpoint. By HIT I mean lifting heavy weights, doing hard body-weight exercises like pull-ups, or sprinting, for a period that lasts no more than 10 to 15 minutes.

What's preferable about it?

1) HIT, in its resistance training manifestation,helps add lean body mass (LBM) or muscle to your physique. It thus counteracts muscle atrophy, one of the biggest problems of aging. The technical term for the latter is sarcopenia, if you want to impress you friends with ten dollar words.

To add significant levels of lean body mass you do have to eat substantially more quality protein and calories with your daily meals. At least from 400 to 500 calories per day of nutritious foods (not just empty filler like pizza). During the resistance exercise itself, the body breaks down muscle protein. It is only during the two to three days after a hard routine (which is why you should rest a lot) that your body synthesizes new muscle protein.

2) HIT can be fit into any schedule. You can even do it waiting for a plane. You can be out of the gym in 10 to 20 minutes, and you don't really have to initiate this routine much more than once per week. I do it sometimes three times per week, simply because I like the taut, kind of perky feeling the workout gives me. Still, those three routines take up a grand total of less than an hour, and I seldom do them three or more times in a week.

3) HIT is very effective at maintaining endurance. I think this is due in part to the metabolic improvements that this post discusses below. I'm able to run and cycle well, without doing any substantial steady-state running or cycling. I thus avoid the wear-and-tear and oxidative damage often associated with the latter. This conditioning is probably due in part to the years of physical adaptation I experienced while I cycled and ran thousands of miles (which I've stopped for almost two years), but I never really fall out of shape for those activities.

4) HIT keeps you very strong for practical purposes. What if you needed a lot of strength to save someone or yourself (e.g., carry someone down a mountain; pull someone out of difficult surf or flood waters)? That takes not only adrenaline, but extra lean body mass to provide the heavy lifting.

5) HIT benefits our metabolism in a way that long-distance running and cycling almost never does.

The excellent book Body by Science by Dr. Doug McGuff has an elegant explanation of the physiology that lies behind this kind of training. I'll reiterate a couple of the book's points.

The cardiovascular system provides oxygen for the purpose of metabolism to the skeletal muscles, which represent about 40 percent or more by weight of the human body. As you add and strengthen skeletal muscle, the heart, lungs, and veinous system; as well as the metabolic machinery within muscle cells that catabolizes glucose and fatty acids to generate ATP (the body's energy currency), upregulates as an adaptive response to the new muscle.

In other words, weight lifting is cardiovascular training. We just never knew it before.

In fact, as you're adding new muscle all over your body, improving your metabolism and triggering these adaptive responses, it follows that the cardiovascular training effect is much greater than just going out and jogging, only using the slow-twitch fibers of the lower body.

The high-intensity resistance stimulus drains the glycogen stored inside fast-twitch muscle fibers. This process, which is known as glycogenolysis, is prompted by adrenaline, the fight-or-flight hormone that usually accompanies high-intensity exercise. The pancreatic hormone glucagon, the counterpart to insulin, also sets glycogenolysis in motion.

Glycogen is an animal form of stored starch, which is composed of long polymers of glucose monomers. Glycogen is primarily stored in the liver (about 100 grams) and skeletal muscles (roughly 200 grams). The brain, kidneys, red- and white-blood cells, and the uterus during pregnancy, also store small amounts of glycogen.

Muscle cells do not have the ability to release their own stored glycogen in the form of glucose into the bloodstream, for uptake by other cells. Muscle cells do not have the enzyme glucose-6-phosphatase, which is necessary to share glucose. We've evolved to provide our muscles with only their own quickly tapped stored-energy source.

Draining the glycogen in fast-twitch muscles increases the insulin sensitivity of those muscle cells, the BBS book argues, because when the muscle cleaves its glycogen, then that cell is then more sensitive to the uptake of glucose from the bloodstream (to be used as energy or further stored as glycogen). Thus working out your fast-twitch fibers helps keep you metabolically healthy.

The opposite effect is a maladaptation. The glycogen in the "sprint" muscles that hard pull-ups or weight lifting recruit never gets used up by low-level training, and the muscle cell loses its insulin sensitivity. The athlete might be taking in carbohydrates and has a lot of glucose swishing around in his bloodstream, causing the glycogen-loaded cells to be less responsive to insulin (simplistically, a hormone or messenger, a kind of doorman for glucose in the cell).

The implication is that we have evolved to periodically blast through these muscle-specific energy sources, and not let the glucose "stack up" forever in the large, heavy-lifting muscle fibers.

These are training benefits at the metabolic level, and I think they make sense for longterm health.

The 'Less Is More' School Of Exercise

2010-09-01T06:56:00.000-07:00

This morning I exercised for all of 15 minutes. It was hard. I did each routine right up to a maximum effort: about 30 dips, cable pulldowns (three sets of increasing weight), a variation on the cable bent-over row with about 190 pounds, and bicep curls. Then I walked out of the gym before many others were finished with their warm-ups.

As explained by the excellent and original book Body By Science (BBS), the purpose of exercise should be to stimulate a positive adaptive response with as minimal an effort as is necessary. This is a variation on the less is more school of exercise, which you can think of as urging people not to spend endless amounts of their hard-earned time on a machine while their bodies are mostly awash in stress hormones like cortisol.

I'm going to paraphrase BBS here on the futility of many forms of routines coined by the old term aerobic exercise. You go to the gym and end up running hard on a treadmill for more than an hour. The machine tells you that you burned, say 400 calories. That amount includes your basel metabolic rate (BMR), which is the amount of calories you would have burned during the hour if you were lying on a couch. That's why the machine had asked for your height, weight, and gender, to pre-compute your BMR. For me, that would be about 70 calories per hour.

So the exercise actually consumed about 400 - 70 = 330 calories. If you do this kind of exercise routinely you will begin consuming your own lean body mass (LBM) or protein, because long bouts of endurance exercise will convert protein to glucose for energy (gluconeogenesis). Let's say your LBM drops by six pounds over time, which isn't unusual (actually kind of conservative as an estimate). Here's a reasonable link on this issue of how many calories a pound of muscle will burn.

A pound of muscle burns roughly five to ten calories per day, so the loss of six pounds of LBM means another 50 or so fewer calories burned daily as a result of this kind of exercise. So you're down to 330 - 50 = 280 calories. Then by the time you've showered and/or dressed and hit the lonesome parkway nearby the gym, you're getting hungry. You just ran hard for more than an hour. Your favorite bakery looms on the horizon.

You're going to reward yourself with one medium-sized corn muffin. That doesn't sound like much, hardly a reward. But the muffin constitutes 345 calories. So you've just gained 345 - 280 = 75 calories on the transaction, by running hard for more than an hour on a treadmill.

The next post will try to explain why the shorter, harder exercise routine was better.

Downhill Mountainbiking: Adrenaline Junkies Apply Here

2010-08-22T10:28:00.000-07:00

I tried downhill mountainbiking at Sugarbush in Warren, VT for the first time. Wow, it's hard. Challenging. Exciting. And potentially hazardous, unless you have someone like Shaun White's innate abilities. If you like riding downhill over rocks, sometimes big stones, loose sand and gravel, occasional mud, and the human remains of some of the riders who preceded you, the unlucky ones, then this sport is for you.

Here's how it works.

You put on pads that look more like armor or a Terminator Halloween costume (I only wore the knee/shin pads and elbow protection), and a full-face helmet. You have a mountainbike that weighs a lot for bikes (about 40 pounds), and has front and rear suspension. They go for heavier weight bikes, to take the pounding and stay on the trail, rather than the super-light frames that roadies prefer. Then, you buy a pass for the chairlift.

The bike hangs on a hook on the back of one of the chairs. You ride in an adjacent chair, to the top of the downhill bike course. The course has numerous trails that are labeled like a ski area's: green, blue, and black (green being the easiest; black only for the skilled and those whose bodies have already been injected with Novocain). You get off the lift and you head down on your trail of choice, such as numerous S-turns through woods.

You are supposed to remain mostly out of the saddle, and keep the feet free of clip-in pedals to touch down when needed (I know, the prior description sounds a bit contradictory; how can you stand on the peddles while keeping a foot free?).

Here's a good tutorial on downhill mountainbiking technique. Personally, being a tyro, I spent more time sitting down than is recommended. I thought it was more efficient on the flat traverses to save energy.

It is a 1,500+ foot descent in elevation from the top of the lift at Sugarbush. So if you take 15 minutes to finish the course then you are descending at about 100 feet per minute.

Downhill Mountainbiking has some features of a good paleo sport: random, split-second decision-making, unanticipated, variable uphill sprints on some parts of the trails; uses the big muscles of both the upper and lower body (it takes more energy than you think). Then again, paleo routines are designed to keep you on your feet and healthy, whereas this activity has a pretty high bone-fracture potential.

I guess if you were stuck on the mountain and a lightning storm was approaching, having the bike nearby would allow you to get to the bottom faster. Otherwise, only adrenaline junkies need apply for this sport.

Adventure Camp Immersion: An Antidote to What Ails Us

2010-08-21T12:30:00.000-07:00

My son Scott spent the last week in Sugarbush's adventure camp in Warren, VT. He hiked up peaks and mountain streams with his fellow trekkers. They climbed Lincoln Peak in the Green Mountains two days in a row from half-way up the mountain, a more than thousand foot elevation gain.

These were kids as young as six, and there were minimal complaints (I should know, I was with them the second day). The second hike lasted about four and a half hours, and covered the entire ridge, encompassing the Long Trail, from Lincoln Peak, past a set of cliffs nicknamed The Church (a big-air launching pad for skiers), to the Castlerock chair, then down to Sugarbush's base area.

The end of the week we hiked up a mountain stream about half a mile and had cold swims and lessons in the local hydrology (yes I was with them again, I need adventure too!). I spent quite a bit of time during the first of two "creek cruises" swimming in the crystal clear 55-degree water. I measured it with a pool thermometer. Cold water immersion, as I've written about here, is an effective form of hormesis, or "good stress."

It doesn't matter whether you're six or 96, we all have innate drives for adventure and playful exploration. It's in our DNA. In a way, we're all misfits. We have hunter-gatherer bodies and brains that are maladapted for 21st century living.

As for young children, climbing bushy slopes and rocky streams with your buddies, until all you can see around you is unbroken forest, green layers of groundcover, and cascading waterfalls, is the best antidote to the vapid, culturally toxic American suburbs.

Good Food As Preventive Medicine; The Black Swan Author on Complex Systems, Diet, Exercise

2010-08-14T11:53:00.000-07:00

Doctors in Massachusetts are writing "prescriptions" for veggies by handing out vouchers that can be used at farmer's markets. Real food isn't medicine; it's just what we should live on, when we're not fasting. But a step in the right direction:

Eat an Apple (Doctor’s Orders)

Nassim Taleb, the author of The Back Swan, points to the least foreseeable events, black swans like 9/11, the Gulf oil disaster, and the 2008 economic collapse, as commonly the most influential factors even if we all assume they will never happen. Now, with references to Art De Vany (The New Evolution Diet) and Dr. Doug McGuff (Body By Science), as well as long walks, fast hard weights, and fasting, Taleb seems to have embraced a Paleolithic approach. Read his essay:

Why I Walk

Sleep My Friends, You'll Do Better

2010-08-09T13:53:00.000-07:00

What if I walked up and said "drink water or some other safe substance in the liquid state if you're thirsty. You might feel better; the experts swear by it!" You'd probably look at me as if I had two heads. The advice is trite and obvious. People generally don't need to be told to drink when thirsty. So why do so many people ignore or laugh off advice to get more sleep?

Sleep might be just as important as diet in keeping you out of a diseased state as you age. In other words, you could have a great paleo, sugarless diet, but if you only averaged six hours of sleep per night or less (as is the modern American average), your immune system would probably go south regardless of all that pastured and nonprocessed food you were chowing.

It's interesting the way that hunter gatherers sleep, in big groups and when they feel like it. They sleep 8-9 hours a 24-hour period, not just at night, like we used to when we were on farms in the nineteenth century. They tend to be healthier, a lot freer of chronic illness, than we are. I sleep 8 hours a night or try to, but it has to be in a quiet cave-like setting. I'm not a "social sleeper."

A friend of mine put it nicely when he said "they shouldn't call it sleep, they should rename it cell-regeneration time" or the like, because "sleep" has the decades-old reputation as "the lame thing I'm doing why everyone else is having a great time."

I think at least three other influences rob people of sleep: 1) the joyless doctrine of the Protestant Work Ethic, which suggests that anyone who isn't staying up late to beat the World or who is taking a nap is "lazy and feckless"; 2) the web; the web; the web; just staying up late every night bathed in liquid crystal display rays, or whatever your terminal is emitting; and 3) myopic employers, who don't equate well-rested employees with higher productivity, more cerebral creativity, and a lower accident rate in industrial settings (all the sleep-work studies show this). Google and other progressive companies are different there.

This 2007 study from the UPenn School of Medicine found that chronic sleep deprivation of less than 7 hours per night! (the average American does not get 7 per night) had the same adverse neurological affects as "severe acute total sleep deprivation," as well as adverse physiological consequences.

There are thousands of sleep related studies on Pubmed. I don't think you'll find too many that conclude, "ignore sleep, it doesn't matter that much."

How many billions of dollars of medical costs could be avoided each year in the U.S., if people made an effort to get healthy snoozes?

Many of the countries that seem to have far lower disease rates than Americans, for instance, have a siesta type tradition, like in Italy or Spain, where they break each work day for a relaxing lunch or snooze. In other Western nations, we tend to brag about or seek sympathy for how much sleep we didn't get the night before.

An important part of the Paleo regimen is to sleep like your inner hunter gatherer, which is 8-9 hours or more per night. Work and family hours can be crazy. So sleep whenever you have the opportunity. Don't deny yourself sleep if you're baked and have some time to catch up; there's no glory in it, only adolescent posturing. Take a nap, go to bed early, and ignore the sneering of your friends and family. You'll be stronger and smarter than them with better sleep.

Here's a giant amount of sleep/health references I cut from WebMd:

SOURCES: Sleep: "We Are Chronically Sleep Deprived," Vol. 18 No. 10. Sleep Medicine, Kryger, Meir, et al., Third Edition. 2000. Sleep: "Excessive Daytime Sleepiness and Risk of Occupational Injuries in Non-shift Daytime Workers," Vol. No. 3. Heart Disease, Vol. 4 No. 5. Sleep "The Cost of Sleep-Related Accidents," Vol. 17, No. 1. National Center on Sleep Disorders Research. Sleep: "Health Care Utilization in the 10 Years Prior to Diagnosis in Obstructive Sleep Apnea Syndrome Patients," Vol. No. 22. Journal of Clinical Hypertentions, Vol. 4 No. 6. Journal of the American Board of Family Practice, Vol. 15 No. 2. Sleep: "Sleepiness-Related Accidents In Sleep Apnea Patients," Vol. 23 No. 3. AM Rev Respir Dis: "Automobile Accidents Involving Patients with Obstructive Sleep Apnea," Vol. 138. Am J Respir Crit Care Me: "Simulated Driving Performance in Patients With Obstructive Sleep Apnea," Vol. 154. Circulation: "Effect of Nasal Continuous Positive Airway Pressure Treatment on Blood Pressure in Patients with Obstructive Sleep apnea," Vol. 107. News release, "Planning to Lose Weight in the New Year? Experts Say, Think Sleep. Studies Show Sleep Loss May Sabotage Success of No.1 Resolution," Sanofi-Synthelabo Inc. Columbia University, Dept.of Otolaryngology, Head and Neck Surgery.

Paleo Brunch Revealed

2010-08-08T11:03:00.001-07:00

I tucked away this paleo meal around mid-morning Sunday, after about 13.5 hours of an overnight fast. Obviously, no grains or refined sugar need apply, including oatmeal, toast, pancakes, jelly, maple syrup, etc. The food is not "orthodox paleo" because it contains dairy, but who's quibbling? The meal contained, in a nutshell (but including no nuts):

2 Eggs/ 2 egg beaters

1 Avocado

3 Slices bacon

A generous portion of Vermont cheddar

Cooked spinach, in the omelet

Raspberries

This is the first time I've pictured any of the food that I eat, and I promise not to very often (kind of dull to write and read about a meal, huh?). On the other hand, the many new paleo adopters like examples of what to eat.

I did include the fitday.com screenshot to show the calorie total, as well as the macronutrient breakdown of the food. It was 807 calories; 44 grams protein; 65% fats; 22% protein; 13% carbs, which is fairly typical of a paleo meal.

Why You Can't Run From Portsmouth to Boston, Without the GUs And Bars

2010-08-02T10:33:00.000-07:00

The human body has a lot of energy stored as fat, probably more than you think. Let's do the math. Even a skinny guy, with say 10 extra pounds of fat beyond that which is necessary for survival (roughly two to five percent in men, 10 percent or more in women), has about 35,000 calories to burn, in storage.

The body has stored triglycerides in:

adipose tissue or fat cells;

inside the muscle fiber itself, adding up to a few hundred calories; and

as part of some fats circulating in the bloodstream with their protein carriers.

This should be enough energy for about ten hours of continuous hard running, at almost 350 calories or more burned per hour. A person with larger amounts of body fat carries well over 50,000 calories of onboard energy.

So why can't you run from Portsmouth to Boston, living off of these efficiently stored energy resources? How come you just bonk, badly, at 20 miles or less, unless you're guzzling energy drinks and sucking down GUs?

At rest, we're burning about 70 percent fats, the body's preferred fuel most of the time, such as when sleeping. But when we are running, thus pegging the heart rate at a high level, the body begins craving a much higher ratio of glucose, or carbohydrate, so that the prior ratio of fats to glucose is reversed.

Suddenly, you need more carbs or glucose to burn, and the machine that has been harvesting energy from your body fat is tailing off. Of course, all of this is a very dynamic system, and the body is using fats, carbs, and protein for energy in a chaotic, interrelated manner.

The extra glucose the body needs at high rates of exertion includes the glucose that can be converted from muscle fiber or protein via gluconeogenesis (and you generally do not want to be consuming large amounts of your hard-earned lean body mass).

This reversal in the use of fat while hard running is partly because:

The cellular, metabolic pathway for converting triglycerides to energy, which has a different configuration than the glucose to ATP pathway, appears ill-designed to keep up with the excessive, constant energy demands of ultra-running or -cycling.

Glucose, or carbs, is the only energy resource the cells can create ATP from anaerobically, or in the absence of oxygen. And you know oxygen is in shorter supply when you're running or cycling hard long distance.

The body also emits excessive levels of stress hormones like cortisol during hard endurance events, which suppresses lipolysis, by which the body uses fats for energy.

The upshot is that we are not naturally designed for ultra running. If we were, we would have a metabolic system of a different nature, for example, one that could provide mostly fats during a hard, hours-long run.

We have evolved for sprinting, and long slow treks like hiking. The liver stores small amounts of glycogen, and the skeletal muscles store their own long chains of glucose (glycogen). Muscles do not share their glycogen. For example, you could be doing your Portsmouth to Boston run but never be able to use the glycogen stored in your fast-twitch muscles, because whereas your run speed feels fast (for that many miles!), you are not sprinting. Far from it.

The muscles are designed for short bursts of high-intensity exercise where they can utilize their own stored glycogen, like a dragster racer that burns up its fuel in a few seconds. As in a hunter gatherer chasing something, or fleeing from it.

Some athletes, in rare instances, have a low-carb diet and have taught their bodies to use ketones for long-distance energy. I haven't tried it, but I assume a chronic-cardio type event would push me to into supplementing with excessive amounts of sugar, or glucose.

A Tale of Two Ages

2010-07-28T04:33:00.000-07:00

I was hiking on Camel's Hump in Vermont on July 27, when I came upon a tall slim man moving slowing but deliberately up the Monroe Trail. We started chatting, and he gave me some good advice about turning my hike into a loop, which I ended up doing, from the Monroe Trail to the Alpine to the Long Trail, and back down the Monroe. He had hiked all over Vermont, and turned out to be 81 years old.

Camel's Hump isn't hard, but it is 6.8 miles roundtrip and a gain of almost 2000 feet in elevation. How many octogenarians do you know who can do that, including scramble over rocks? In the U.S., I only knew stories up till now. I shook Don's hand and told him he was doing great, better than most. He me told he hadn't started the vast majority of his climbing until he was 60.

Then I went on to the summit, a big space of Alpine tundra with fantastic 360 degree views of the Green Mountains. Up sauntered another older fella who looked really put together, a big very well-organized pack with a Appalachian Trail decal affixed to it. He had hiked the entire AT "for his 65th birthday." He said he had done it alone because the few friends he had who would consider such a trek had medical issues that prevented them from going. And guess what he was doing now? Hiking the entire Long Trail from the Canadian border down, at presumably 66 years of age.

He said he took days off once in a while during his treks. He called them "zero days." His wife would leave a car at certain points along the trail. He had a tent and an inflatable mattress, and believe me, even in the Summer, the Vermont weather can be very unkind.

I said good luck to him and mentioned that he too was doing a great thing at his age, pure hiking without the comforts at the end of a rugged trek that I usually provide myself. He said that these long treks he was taking were "on my bucket list." Although built very differently than the 81 year old - this guy was burly, strong, and even carried a little extra weight - I found both of these guys inspiring. They seemed to distill the essence of outdoors adventuring and health. As I was talking to the Long Trail trekker, up wandered Don, poking his trekking poles toward the summit with a big smile on his face.

A Reconciliation Commission for Cycling Violators

2010-07-26T05:18:00.000-07:00

I'm going to deviate from nutrition and fitness (not by that much though) to express an opinion after following the Tour De France this year. My view of the doping issue in cycling is that they should set up a South Africa style reconciliation commission. Everyone who took part in some kind of illegal performance enhancement must publicly admit to wrongdoing under a general amnesty, since an unknown number that we can assume is many cyclists were doing it, and possibly give up the titles they won while doping.

In South Africa, the reconciliation commission has been largely deemed a success in healing the country and avoiding massive bloodshed, despite the heinous crimes of some of those who were given amnesty. This kind of mechanism for cycling would the clear the air, halt the excessive expenditure of legal and investigative resources on this issue (how about directing those resources toward Medicare fraud instead, which is understaffed and squanders hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money per year?), as well as stop the arbitrary destruction of lives, the doping athlete du jour, where some people have their lives wrecked (e.g., Tyler Hamilton), and other possible or obvious dopers are passed over.

There is also a certain amount of ambiguity involved with performance enhancement, casting into doubt the ethical justification of some of these prohibitions. Is there really a huge physiological or legal difference between sleeping in an altitude tent and reinjecting your own red blood cells? Way back when, just running at altitude in Boulder allowed me to come back to Boston at sea level and set all my lifetime running records, including a 32 10K and a 2:43 marathon.

It's still important to send the strong message to young people that taking pharmaceuticals to enhance athletic performance is unhealthy and warped. A reconciliation commission would not dilute that message.

What do you think, including the Lance fans?

How Flash Floods Will Alter a Swimming Hole

2010-07-22T05:38:00.000-07:00

The Warren and Waitsfield, Vermont area had a flash flood warning last night, big thunderstorms and hail the size of small ice cubes. I went down to Lareau swim hole, where a few days before I was swimming around with my goggles watching the lazy brook trout. The video tells the story. The air smelled of mud and the Mad River had been completely transformed. That rock in the background is usually about half or more exposed and I practice climbing on to it from the water, as sort of a playground agility exercise.

Heed flash flood warnings, and clear off rivers anyways when thunderstorm cells are on the horizon.

A Few Tips For Better Metabolism, Health

2010-07-21T12:36:00.000-07:00

I brought these measures up to a friend who's interested in dropping a few extra pounds, but the bottom line is that these practices generally promote improved health. The leanness is a manifestation of a healthier metabolism.

Cut down or eschew grains (e.g., wheat), refined flour, and sugars, as in all deserts; cereals, bagels, pizza, scones, pasta, etc. Eating grains and refined flour in the quantities modern people usually consume them, is a very efficient fat-generating scheme. The liver and skeletal muscles store small amounts of carbohydrate in a starch-like molecule called glycogen. It doesn't take much carb consumption to fill up our glycogen in the liver (the liver stores about 100 grams or 400 calories worth, with roughly an equal to four times that amount of glycogen stored in skeletal muscles, making a total of about 800 -1200 calories of stored glycogen).

Then most carbs consumed after your glycogen is topped off in the liver and muscles will be converted to triglycerides and stored as fat. The body's cells will not convert the high glucose levels brought on by refined carbs into unlimited amounts of energy or ATP (cells can store only a limited amount of ATP, the body's energy currency). That "extra" energy will be stored away, as mostly fat since this is the body's principal storage depot. Excessive grain and refined-flour consumption can also promote insulin resistance, and the associated high fasting glucose and insulin levels; and contains gluten and other problematical biochemicals like antinutrients.

Eat a higher fat (a lower carb approach is a higher fat diet by definition) diet, but don't eat high fats with high or moderate carbs, thus skimping on the protein (see here for more discussion of higher fat diets). Fats are satiating and energy-dense, but consumed in conjunction with a big carb dish will generate more body fat. Eat higher fats and protein.

Get adequate sleep. People who are sleep deprived are more likely to overeat and put on body fat. See this link and many other references. It seems to be a compensatory mechanism; when I'm underslept, I crave carbs and other foods, more than I need metabolically.

Intermittently fast, such as once in a while have overnight fasts of 15-18 hours. This article explains IF in detail.

You can get a lot of mileage out of just these practices.

Macronutrient Ratios

2010-07-16T08:05:00.000-07:00

One of my daughter's friends sent along a text message about his macronutrient ratio (MR), which gave me the idea for this post. The MR is one of those concepts that you don't have to needlessly obsess over, but it is still important to the diet, and also somewhat controversial these days. The MR represents the portions of your diet that are composed of the macronutrients: carbohydrates, protein, and fats. A typical way to represent them is to say "40-30-30," which can mean "40 percent fats; 30 percent protein, and 30 percent carbs."

Everything you eat is composed of these primary biochemicals: chains of amino acids (proteins), fatty acids (fats), and various configurations of simple sugars (carbs). Vitamins, minerals, and other trace biochemicals are also present, but for the most part, that blob on your plate is made up of proteins, fats, and carbs, sometimes all three, and seldom just one (butter is an example of a food that is just one of these constituents, fat).

The human body needs this stuff for fuel and to rebuild yourself, from the cellular level on up. The old cliche from the Seventies "you are what you eat" is largely true. Your body will take the types of fats that you are eating, for example, and incorporate them when needed in cell membranes and to cushion internal organs and create sheaths around neurons, for instance, and the amino acids that you eat will be used for the multitudinous purposes of protein (the body's main structural component; a gene is just a recipe for making a protein).

So what's a good macronutrient ratio?

The federal government guidelines, at least the ones I was brought up on, might say "get most of your calories from whole grains and other carbs, get enough protein but not too much, and restrict fats and cholesterol." Hmmm...I don't know about you, but I'm going to pass on that advice.

A Paleolithic approach to diet is often, in practice, a high-fat diet, because if you eat a lot of healthy, local (when possible), and whole foods like avocados, pastured eggs, fish, grass-fed meats, nuts, and some full-fat Greek yogurt in judicious amounts, and cook with coconut oil and butter most of the time, then you are getting a lot of healthy fats.

"The ability of the body to metabolize protein ends at about one-third of calories," according to Stephan of the excellent Whole health Source blog. In fact, read his entry The Myth of the High protein Diet. The upshot is that the "protein" component of your ratio should sensibly not exceed 33 percent.

My own macronutrient ratio looks like roughly 55 (fats) - 25 (protein) - 20 (carbs). A gram of dietary fat is about 9 calories, with a gram of both protein and carbs making up about 4 calories. So if I eat 2,500 calories in a day, then I'm getting about 153 grams of fat; about 156 grams of protein, and roughly 125 grams of carbs. The calories have to come from somewhere, so if you opt for a very low-carb approach (say, far less than 100 grams per day), then you are probably eating more fats.

The body's preferred fuel at rest, which is most of the day and night, are fats. About 70 percent of the fuel you burn at rest are fats.

As for anecdotal evidence, a high-fat diet has not made me fat (so much for that erroneous claim). I have from 7.5 to 9 percent body fat at age 53, much healthier body composition than when I was 40, for instance, and eating a lot of carbs. This is a very complex metabolic topic, but to summarize, all carbs are sugars in different configurations, whether they come from refined sugar, brown rice, or a banana. For example, starch is composed of long chains of the simple sugar glucose, whereas table sugar is made up of two simple sugars attached to each other: glucose and fructose.

If you eat predominantly carbs, then your blood sugar levels can be relatively high throughout the day, which can promote chronically high insulin levels. Among other things, insulin is a fat-generating biochemical at excessive levels (insulin sends the signal to store fat and restrict the use of fat as fuel). Personally, I find the argument that we have not evolved over millions of years to consume chains of sugar all day very compelling. That's why my own MR minimizes carbs, to a certain degree.

How do you compute your own MR? One accurate enough and easy method is to go to fitday.com and enter your foods for a few days. This will give you a good baseline and some numbers to toss around. Fitday will also estimate the amount of vitamins and minerals represented by your diet.

I didn't want to write thousands of words on this topic, but its complexity certainly merits it. I hope this helps.

References:

Plant-animal subsistence ratios and macronutrient energy
estimations in worldwide hunter-gatherer diets; Dr. Cordain etal.

The Myth of the High protein Diet; Whole health Source blog.

Eating On The Road

2010-07-15T09:38:00.000-07:00

It's always a challenge to eat in a disciplined and healthy manner when you're on the road, which encompasses a good portion of many of our lifestyles. You're not cooking your own meals a lot of the time, and if you're in a different region or country, you're dependent on their traditional foods, which may not fit the Paleo regimen. The best way to deal with this situation is to minimize the deviations and "cheats" from the typical whole-food, low-carb approach, with the knowledge that it won't hurt to eat the "bad foods" for very short time periods.

I ate a lot more bread in Bermuda and Europe than I ever eat at home (nearly zero consumption of flour), but I used the bread as a "carrier" for pastured butter and high-quality cheeses, so the food wasn't a total loss. In other words, with bread, butter, and cheese, the bread was the junk food. I must admit that I felt more indigestion than I ever feel at home, but I felt guilty pleasure in consuming the fresh restaurant bread. I ate zero refined sugar (no sweet breads or deserts; no ice cream in Europe, wow!), and continued to carry nuts, seeds, carrots, and apples with me most of the time. I ate big salads with meats and fish, and no pasta at all (er, one ravioli dish, unfinished, in Italy), so I did pretty well.

I drank copious amounts of their great coffee, and a bit more alcohol than I usually do, but not enough to compromise what I was doing the next day. I travel to have adventures and discover unfamiliar cultures, not nurse hangovers.

These were very active trips as well, whenever I could, with a lot of swimming, walking, hiking, and mountainbiking, perhaps a little too much cardio-type exercise. All in all, no damage done. The moral of the story being, just because you're on the road doesn't mean that you cannot carry fresh veggies, fruits, nuts, seeds, and maybe a little high cacao chocolate with you. Other regions of the world, such as Asia, with the preponderance of rice, may present more obstacles to "staying Paleo," but I can only comment on that when I've visited those regions.

Some things about my travels were better than home, like the fantastic cold-water swims I took almost every day in the Sargosso Sea first, then in Alpine glacial lakes.

Head For The Fitness Trail, Or Parcourse

2010-07-11T03:47:00.000-07:00

Ever used a fitness trail or a parcourse? These are trails, mostly through the woods, that involve numbered stations that exercise different parts of the body. You do jumping drills, pull-ups, stretches, swings, or balance beams, etc., then go on to the next station in the sequence. I'm partial to them because of the variety, the playfulness, the strength and balance orientation, and the outdoors location.

A parcourse has something for everyone, and offers a superior method of attaining fitness than simply jogging or walking through the woods.

I wish I had one near my home. Switzerland is blanketed with what they call vitaparcours. We tried one when we were there, and loved it. It's a great way to augment a hike or walk. I'm not sure whether the U.S. has a similar network, but I'm sure many urban or suburban settings have set up these trails to sample during your travels.

You can also improvise your own parcourse (call it a "wild run") by doing pull-ups, jumps, and sprints along any wooded trail using branches and downed trees.

Alpine Splendor: Hiking and Touring

2010-07-05T07:45:00.000-07:00

I've had a chance to take a brief trip to the Alps this Summer with my family, including a tour of the Eiger-Jungfrau region in Switzerland and an easy but satisfying mountain climb near the Walensee outside of Zurich.

Nothing too ambitious or exciting like glacier trekking and climbing Piz Palu last year with a guide, but my children and I had fun soaking up the spectacular scenery and playing around in the snow at around 10,000 feet, courtesy of the amazing engineering feat of the Jungfraujoch and Jungfraubahn railway through the Eiger.

Then I returned to the Walensee region, a big glacial lake surrounded by picturesque peaks, and hiked Leistchamm (6,891 feet), a four-hour roundtrip from the ski town of Arvenbuhl. It wasn't technical or difficult at all, but I cannot say that it was no sweat because the hike was really hot!

It's mostly climbing steps and over rocks at very steep grades with good shoes and trekking poles. I'm a big fan now of trekking poles because they take the weight off my aging knees during the down climbs. I hate descents!

The next photo shows a couple of mountains: Rautispitz in the foreground, and Vrenelisgartli, that I have climbed in the past more than once. I included the picture because it's so nice!

I've found that paleo-style conditioning (mostly short-term, high-intensity weights and occasional sprints) have kept me in good shape for both steep hiking and mountainbike climbing, neither of which I do much of at home.

The nights here are beautiful. It's still light at about ten o'clock. Yesterday I did a two-mile mountainbike climb with an average grade of more than 9 percent, with segments of up to 20 percent. I wouldn't do this too often because I don't want to overtax my system, but this low-gear climb lasted only 27 minutes. It's a wondrous thing to bike uphill in the Alps in the cool night air, something I certainly cannot do in Massachusetts.

Book Review: "The Great Cholesterol Con"

2010-06-08T11:44:00.000-07:00

What if everything you were told by anyone about maintaining a healthy cardiovascular system was wrong? You know, all that total-cholesterol and LDL stuff you get at the doctor's office, and avoiding foods containing cholesterol and fats like the plague. Is this fatally bad advice? This might sound familiar to readers of the seminal book by Gary Taubes, Good Calories Bad Calories, which used rigorous, uncompromising research to topple the shaky foundations beneath the "dietary fats" theory of heart disease. I picked up Dr. Malcolm Kendrick's The Great Cholesterol Con this week, a shorter, very readable and more flippant book than GCBC, but which takes Taubes' argument even further beyond food.

Kendrick spends several chapters in a wry state of shock over the weak to nonexistent evidence used to justify the "diet-heart" theory about, for example, saturated fat and cholesterol causing atherosclerosis and heart attacks. For example, Ancel Key's oft-cited conclusion from the Seven Countries Study, in which the countries that had high intakes of saturated fat but lower heart-attack rates were excluded from the results (the other population groups were cherry-picked to support a theory, in other words).

Kendrick explains the French Paradox in another way. The French, and the Swiss for that matter, have a very high saturated-fat intake (i.e., from cheese, butter, cream), but low heart attack rates, as low as one-fourth the rates in many countries that have lower saturated-fat consumption. Stress is the culprit in heart attacks, not diet, according to "Cholesterol Con." And more than just red-wine consumption, the way of living in these countries, the methods of eating (taking great care in food choices and not eating under stress), are more relaxed than in other countries.

"Con" also spends at least a chapter discussing the link between very high rates of heart disease and "social dislocation" (a big stressor) among diverse groups, like Australian aborigines, and groups of displaced Fins and Scotsman.

In physiological terms, Kendrick explains, stress breaks the system by which the adrenal glands release cortisol, a condition called Hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis (HPA) dysfunction. Pardon the medical gobbledygook, but it's really not that complicated. Say you're given an impossible deadline at work, or else. Your job is on the line, but you have no control over the outcome; you're trapped. Stress ensues.

The hypothalamus, a part of the brain, signals the tiny pituitary gland, which sits beneath the brain, to secrete ACTH, a hormone that in turn stimulates the adrenals to release the hormone cortisol (thus the "axis," the three components of the nervous system are interrelated).

When the HPA axis is broken, as in chronic high stress, then the body is bathed in abnormal or high cortisol levels. Kendrick goes into painstaking detail to explain the link between cortisol and the endothelial damage to the arteries that can lead to cardiovascular problems and a heart attack.

I found Kendrick's argument on the link between stress and heart attacks convincing, as well as the lack of evidence for implicating cholesterol and saturated fat. However, the book tends to zealously dismiss any other dietary factors, and claim that the only substances proven so far to improve cardiovascular health are omega-3 fatty-acid supplementation and moderate alcohol intake. He leads one of his chapters with "Eat Whatever You Like." I would like to have read more discussion of the role of excess sugar (as emphasized in GCBC). Kendrick does mention "high blood sugar" and "insulin spikes" as causes, like cortisol, of endothelial dysfunction.

So the next time someone starts lecturing you about your total cholesterol...The book is actually quite witty and readable considering the deadly seriousness of its subject. A disclosure: my site is linked with Amazon associates.

Seek Adventure, But Stay Cautious

2010-06-05T05:19:00.000-07:00

To paraphrase, never hesitate to seek adventure and unusual outdoor experiences, because for most of us it's healthy. This behavior is part of our DNA. But keep your wits about you and don't take unnecessary risks. I couldn't help but think of my own snorkeling escapade in Bermuda last week, and this Youtube video, only fifteen seconds, of a person filming a Great Barracuda underwater.

He followed the creature, who then had enough of the swimmer and attacked. I came upon barracuda of the same size and was as close or closer than this guy was, but after getting a good look for several seconds turned and left the premises. The barracuda is "just like a dog — if you don't mess with him he'll leave you alone." He's the top predator of the shallow reef, so allow him his territory, which goes for any other similar wildlife. It's not worth getting your hand or forearm torn up. Now that would ruin my day!

Bermudian Euphoria

2010-06-02T11:26:00.001-07:00

I went to Bermuda for the first time over this holiday weekend, and spent much of the time plunging into their cool waters with my goggles and snorkeling equipment. Bermuda, which is due east of South Carolina in the Sargasso Sea (a huge segment of the Atlantic), and about 670 miles east-southeast of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, is an archipelago of 138 islands, completely surrounded by an elaborate reef system.

Bermuda (a good topographical map) is only about 21 miles long and about three miles at it widest point.

The snorkeling, with the clear aquamarine water, abundant aquatic life, and beach-accessible reefs, is spectacular, the best I've ever done. I was in Tucker's Town, on the southern part of the island, near John Smith's Bay. It was like having your own aquarium to swim in, and great exercise to boot. After wrestling with my borrowed equipment, sometimes just swimming the reef with my goggles on was a more effective way to watch the fish.

I didn't do anything fancy like hire a boat to take me to a shipwreck, but it was clear after just a few days that Bermuda is a place where you can stay fit and eat well in a "paleo" way. Seafood, fruits, and veggies.

The reef I explored is actually referred to as a "patch" or lagoonal reef, because it resides 20-30 meters offshore within the island's or atoll's outer reef. Bermuda has been referred by the essays I've read as more of a pseudo atoll. In about fifteen feet of water, I saw a number of fish common to Bermuda, such as Blue Parrotfish, Wrasse, Grouper, Blue Angel Fish, and barracuda on two different occasions!

The first time I ran into two juvenile barracudas I suspect (because they were only about two feet long and cruising along the shallow reef). The adults can be more than five feet long and probably spend most of their time on the deeper outer reef in Bermuda. The second time was my last day. I was on the same spot of the reef where I had encountered the first two, when I looked up and there's a larger one swimming along the reef toward me in the opposite direction. We both took evasive action, so to speak, then the barracuda turned around and looked in my direction with a "this is my territory" look (then again, barracudas seem to always have this look).

Lightning fast, they have a way of appearing stock still for an extended period, like this one did. Hey, I'm not used to these wild aquatic environments (I might run into a bull frog in a pond in New England), so I turned to swim back to the shoreline (as if I could outrun it), but not before pausing to get a good look at this impressive creature. A guy told me once on another island that a barracuda is "just like a dog — if you don't mess with him he'll leave you alone." If you were spear-fishing you might get bitten by one by mistake. On the other hand, Bermuda is a natural, open aquatic environment. The waters are not Disney World, artificially kept safe, and dull, for tourists.

Between the moose and the barracuda, I've had intriguing and rare (for me) close encounters in the last few weeks, and at all times it was me who beat a hasty retreat!

As for fitness in Bermuda, I did two short weight lifts and many extended swims. I started every day with an early morning swim, then had bouts of maybe 20 minutes of snorkeling throughout a few days. The water was actually a bit cool for the subtropics, maybe 70 degrees Fahrenheit. Along with the fish that I ate, the trip left me in probably the best shape of the year, at about 148 pounds, around 137 pounds of it lean body mass.

Swim, Climb, Or The Other Way Around

2010-05-25T10:01:00.001-07:00

I swam in the Mad River on the morning of May 21, for the first time this year (see the video).

The water had warmed by about 10 degrees Fahrenheit, from 50 degrees F. to 60 or 15-16 degrees C., in the last three weeks. The river was highly refreshing, crystal clear (still getting a little snow melt), and warm enough for a long open swim. At 60 degrees, there wasn't any kind of gasp reflex like I would have gotten in 50 degrees F.

I'd like to be able to start everyday with this kind of cold water immersion, a river swim being far more pleasant than a cold shower, and having at least the same benefits for the immune system.

Then I hiked to the top of the castlerock chair at Sugarbush, a 2600 foot vertical (from the resort's parking lot) that is steep but easily attainable in less than two hours, with great views at the top.

There's a hut that ski patrol and others use for warming at the top, and it's always a nice spot to take pictures and eat before I descend. I never see anyone else up there.

Cold water swims are very beneficial following a hard climb or hike because the cool temperature reduces inflammation, often amazingly so. I'll reverse the order the next time!

Vitamin D3: Hockey Players, Climbers, A Good Bet For Everyone

2010-05-23T15:40:00.000-07:00

The Chicago Blackhawks team physicians have apparently put all the players on 5,000 IU per day of D3 for about the last 18 months, after finding many of them deficient, according to the Vitamin D Council newsletter. The council makes available a nice article describing what they consider to be deficient. The D3 supplementation has coincided with much greater success for the hockey team (they are on the brink of the Stanley Cup hockey finals), so it cannot have hurt.

I previously wrote about a study suggesting that Vitamin D can improve athletic performance and increase the size and number of fast-twitch muscle fibers. The benefits of attaining adequate D levels for athletes, either through supplements or sun exposure (the better option, in small doses, because we're designed more for sun than pills) include less inflammation, as well as fewer stress fractures and viruses.

Outside Magazine recently chimed with an article pointing out that many of their editors were found to be deficient in D3 blood levels (the article was not available online as of this writing).

People can order a vitamin D test online at this ZRT Labs site for instance, or from their family doctor. It's called a 25(OH)D, or 25-hydroxyvitamin D test. The council, among other experts or doctors, recommend that you should shoot for 25(OH)D levels of between 50-80 ng/ml (125–200 nmol/L). I take Carlson's Solar D Gems 4,000 IU on most days, especially during the winter months.

Go Nuts: Almonds, Hazelnuts, Macadamias, Walnuts

2010-05-20T11:24:00.000-07:00

You could get up to 10 percent of your daily calories from certain nuts, and not be the worse for wear by it. For example, 200-240 calories from a small mixture of raw walnuts and almonds amid 2400 calories or thereabouts for the day. I often bring a bag of nuts (and not much else but water) on my hikes and downhill skis. They are filling, since most of the nuts I eat are composed of more than 70-80 percent fats. Moving at a moderate trekking, walking, or climbing pace, your body will burn about 70 percent fats for fuel (particularly if you've trained it to burn more fats with a lower-carb, paleo approach). Therefore, a palmful of nuts will provide the body's preferential fuel, even at rest.

The right nuts represent healthy fats. For example, an ounce of walnuts will provide more than two grams of omega 3 fatty acids (if being a bit heavy on omega 6 fats too), according to nutritiondata.com. Macadamias, hazelnuts, and almonds contain mostly monounsaturated fats.

The omega-3 in walnuts is alpha-linolenic acid, the ALA found also in flax seed, and has to be converted by the liver to the beneficial forms of EPA and DHA needed by, for example, the brain. The conversion rate is probably far less than 10 percent, so don't be deceived by the omega-3 levels of walnuts. You still may consider an EPA/DHA supplement, like fish oil.

I prefer to buy and eat nuts raw (minus any shell of course), as roasted nuts may have been cooked in an industrial vegetable oil (like soybean oil) that you are already getting too much of, and you don't need any extra salt on them. Raw nuts commonly contain irrelevant sodium levels.

Here's a nutritional briefing, via nutriondata.com, on the principle nuts I eat:

Walnuts: one ounce, 14 halves, contains 185 calories (roughly 83% fat); four grams of protein; walnuts are about 65 percent polyunsaturated fats.
Macadamias: one ounce, 10-12 kernals, contains about 203 calories (roughly 88% fat); two grams of protein; macadamias are about 78 percent monounsaturated fats.
Hazelnuts: one ounce, 21 kernals, contains about 177 calories (roughly 81% fat); four grams of protein; hazelnuts are about 75 percent monounsaturated fats.
Almonds: one ounce, 23 kernals, contains about 162 calories (roughly 72% fat); six grams of protein; almonds are about 62 percent monounsaturated fats.

Peanuts are not nuts, remember, they are legumes. I had a few at Fenway Park recently, but I generally don't eat them anymore, and aim for healthy "real" tree nuts instead.

A One-ah, A Two-ah, A 100, A 200

2010-05-15T09:53:00.000-07:00

With nothing much else going on in the morning, I decided to go down to the Newburyport track and toss in a few intervals. It's 64 degrees, windy, partly sunny, a Saturday. Not much of a warm-up, a light jog from the car to the track (I'd already done a few push-ups and pull-ups first thing in the morning). Then I ran a lap on the track, wearing my old no-lace racing flats from triathlon days.

I wanted to do two 200s on a track, then 2 100s on the soccer field barefoot. I don't know whether it's meters or yards; I think meters. I ran the first 200, feeling sluggish, in 36 seconds. That seemed slow, so I said to myself, "really pop the second one." 38 seconds. This prompted me, childishly, to do one more. Even though I've kept telling myself, you don't have to kill yourself, run yourself into the ground, to stay healthy.

In fact, the baked feeling you get from long tough workouts is largely the result of stress hormones, like cortisol, which has the effect of burning or catabolizing protein and muscle instead of fats. You want to burn fats and cultivate growth hormone with high-intensity exercise, and good sleeps.

See this article I plucked off the web, which seems to have a good summary of the effect of over-training on excess cortisol, which the adrenal gland secretes.

At any rate, I threw in one more 200 in 35 seconds. Satisfied, I wandered over to the soccer field and took my shoes off.

This time I felt much better. I don't think it was the previous sprints warming me up (although that had something to do with it). It was the fact that I was running on grass barefoot, and that I am specifically better trained for sprinting shorter distances. I sprinted the soccer field in 15 and 16 seconds respectively, then went straight home. The entire workout, not counting very light jogging/walking and stretching, lasted two minutes, twenty seconds.

WBUR and Boston Discovers Paleo

2010-05-08T04:38:00.000-07:00

WBUR had a light piece about the many people adopting "ancestral health" and the paleo regimen in Boston. The story was of the tongue-in-cheek nature of most media descriptions of paleo, but didn't fail to mention that hey, it works. A number of the people described how various medical conditions had dropped away or diminished on the diet. It was nice to see people of all ages adopting the regimen. I didn't even discover it until I was 51!

The story, however, did trot out the discredited saw about how "Paleolithic people only lived to 30." This has always been a red herring. Modern hunter-gatherer peoples are healthier than contemporary urbanites and rarely come down with the "diseases of civilization." Only when they eschew their H&G lifestyles and move to the cities do they generally come down with heart disease and cancer, for instance.

Further, the average height of humans dropped by five or six inches after agriculture was introduced about 12,000 years ago, and Paleolithic people were much more muscular and strong compared with their agricultural counterparts. Paleoanthropologists know this from studying the skeletons. Read Jared Diamond's essay "The Worst Mistake In The History Of The Human Race."

Not Everything Nice: Sugar and Spice

2010-05-06T12:56:00.000-07:00

Now that it's warm enough for spices to grow locally, I've started to rip off handfuls of it and chuck the sprigs and leaves into my salad. I feel like I'm adding lawn grass to my food, but you'd be surprised at how nutritious it is. I usually grow basil and parsley, and buy cilantro, for instance. These plants are loaded with vitamins A, C, and K, depending on where they're grown and the quality of the soil. When it's growing in my garden, I just go out into my yard, grab some, and chew it down.

Although not a spice, fiddleheads have started to grow on the mountainsides in Vermont, plus in lots of swampy areas in New England. Like spices, they are a green plant loaded with generous amounts of vitamins (A, C) and minerals (phosphorus, potassium). They are tasty, and represent a minimal caloric load. I fill my pockets with them when I'm hiking up a ski area in Vermont, then fry them in lots of butter.

Now for the darker side of this post — sugar. As usual, Mark Sisson does a compelling job of producing the definitive guide. Since the schools tend to revolve so many activities around "treats" like honey and maple syrup, I thought I'd shine a light on those two over-consumed, pure-sugar content substances.

An ounce of honey, a dribble beyond a tablespoon, gives you 23 grams of sugar (92 calories), mostly glucose and fructose, according to nutritiondata.com. This amount represents most of the non-starch carbs a small kid should be allowed to consume, if she's not running free in the fields and deftly stealing raw honey from bees, for an entire day.

The 23 grams is only seven grams less than a kid's order of Coke Classic. It will have the same multi-faceted bad metabolic and physiological effects of any sugar. A hunter gatherer would probably come upon honey on rare occasions, gorge themselves if they could wrest it from the bees, then move on and not encounter it for a long, long time. We shouldn't be giving children a lot of honey, as though it's "nectar of the gods."

The anti-bacterial nature of honey, as a topical ointment for example, greatly varies by the honey type. Some honeys are 100 times more anti-microbial than others, which are no more antiseptic than table sugar, according to this site.

Maple syrup is literally, sugar from a tree (the sap is then then boiled down to the syrup). Maple sugar is almost 100 percent composed of the monosaccharides glucose and fructose (it contains some trace minerals like manganese). It has about the same sugar density as honey, 17 grams for an ounce. So, in terms of loading up a kid with sugar, just a dribble more than a tablespoon is the equivalent of about half a Coke Classic. And the way kids dump it on their pancakes or waffles...For children it should be a rare treat. Very rare. I'd rather see it never consumed.

It's important to not overly romanticize honey and maple sugar because they come from bees and trees. They will have the same effect on a kid's metabolism as glucose and fructose molecules from a Snickers bar.

The kind of "primal" (high fat, protein) energy bars that are sprouting up these days, especially homemade bars, or a bit of healthy chocolate, are better ideas for kids' treats.

Spring Hiking Above Frosty Snow Melt

2010-05-03T14:26:00.000-07:00

Believe it or not, I was trudging through slush and up to eight inches of snow this weekend on the Long Trail in Vermont, from the Appalachian Gap trailhead to past the Mad River Glen ski area. The solitude was gratifying and I felt the presence of critters all around! I was the first one, judging from the tracks, to hike the trail from the snowstorm the week before.

Meanwhile, it hit 88 degrees back in the Boston area on the same weekend!

I saw a moose and her two calves on the road near the beginning of the trail. They wandered slowly into the woods just yards from where I started my hike. Then I saw their big two-hooved tracks on the trail.

I was wary and listened for their movement in the woods, because I didn't want to spook the cow with her offspring. There were tracks of various critters all around, given that it was newish snow and early Spring. Black bears are not uncommon in this area, and the frequent appearance of roughly scraped off bark on birch trees by the trail, which the bears will mark during mating season, was evident all around. They are about 90 percent herbivores (therefore they have to eat constantly to maintain their 300+ pounds, for an adult male). Along with the Mom moose nearby, this had my adrenaline going somewhat and added spice to the hike.

I had planned to swim in the Mad River afterward, which was still just 50 degrees Fahrenheit (F) or 10 degrees Centigrade (C) on May 1, 2010, maybe a tad less by my pool thermometer. I ended up wading up to my knees and sticking my arms in to try to get used to it. You cannot really; it was cold enough to hurt. The polar bear plunge for the spring would have to wait at least a week. Meanwhile, I did some quick research on extreme cold-water immersion.

We have, along with other mammals, a built-in mechanism called the mammalian diving reflex. Three things happen to your body when you are submerged in water roughly less than 68 degrees F. or 21 degrees C. This effect is possibly more pronounced the colder the water gets.

Bradycardia; your heart rate slows by up to 25 percent, so if you have a resting heart rate of 60, it drops to 45 beats per minute.

Vasoconstriction of capillaries; your blood flow to the extremities begins to shutdown in order to reserve blood for the internal organs. First the fingers and toes go numb, then hands and feet, and gradually the arms and legs become pretty useless for humans in extreme cold water. This vasoconstriction can also dangerously raise the blood pressure, for people who have cardiological issues.

Blood shift; only during deep dives, blood plasma fills the lung's alveoli (that doesn't sound healthy!).

One web site told the (possibly apocryphal) story of nine elite marines who capsized in 36 degree F. water, and not one survived the 100 yard swim to shore.

Still, very cold water carries potential hazards, such as loss of dexterity in 50 degree F. water within five minutes, if you're not wearing any protective clothing. One of the keys to making the cold plunge, many of which are healthy "good stresses," a fun experience is to adapt by taking very fast dips or immersions over time or cold showers.

Paleolithic Regimen: Not The School of Hard Knocks

2010-04-27T08:15:00.001-07:00

No desserts, no factory food, cold showers, off to bed early...what are you paleo guys, monks? Do you walk down the street chanting and striking yourselves on the backs with chains? Does this mean the end of fun?

To the casual observer, the paleolithic regimen might seem like a spartan, self-abnegating routine with a discipline reserved for the hardened few, but nothing could be further from the truth. I start every day with a big mug of dark roast coffee, for example, and I consider myself a paleo devotee. I eat a bit of Ghiradelli 100 percent cacao chocolate most days, and more days than not I finish with a glass of wine (I would like to cut back a bit on that, as I consider the benefits of moderate drinking to be overblown). The paleo routine is far from Calvinist self-denial and -flagellation.

Much of this regimen involves what we don't do. I watched a disquieting Sixty Minutes segment on the substantive number of college kids who feel they cannot get through their academic schedule without popping unprescribed neuro-enhancers with unknown side effects. Many enthusiastic youngsters have embraced the paleolithic regimen, and you won't see them sneaking an Aderall.

Pursuing health and well-being is fun, rewarding, and good for the community. The paleolithic regimen probably represents an optimal pattern, supported by good science, of eating and exercising. And sleeping. The routine focuses on whole, copious, nutritious, non-sugary, and omnivorous foods. The exercise is "less is more": stay strong, keep and add muscle, don't overdo it.

Unhealthy habits usually have an emotional basis; "work sucked today so I'm going to end my evening with two beers and a pint of Hagen Daz." You get the picture...it's an emotional rut. So much of personal habits and behavior revolve around grappling with emotional states. Take the venerable cold shower (and I'm not talking about Woody Allen's after another spat with Diane Keaton), you know, the kind that promotes hormesis. My initial aversion to getting under the cold water was emotional, now I'm beginning to enjoy them. The water starts at about 68 degrees F. and ends up briefly at more like 55. Well...I don't look forward to them yet as much as I understand their health benefits and benefit from the adaptation to colder temperatures for my up-coming Spring swims. I know swimming in cold water makes me feel great.

People have varied and good reasons for choosing individual disciplines. I'll never forget the older fellow I met in a gym years ago who took his daily cold shower. I asked him why once, and he said it was so he would never forget his buddies who didn't make it at The Battle Of The Bulge in World War II.

Healthy Cold Water Plunges

2010-04-26T14:38:00.000-07:00

I started taking cold morning showers to help adapt myself to some late-Spring northeastern swims. Once I grit my teeth and immerse myself in the cool stream I feel great afterward. I plan on swimming soon off of Plum Island in Massachusetts and in the Mad River in Vermont, but the ocean waters have not even reached 50 degrees F. around here. The Mad River is a little warmer, but still contains snowmelt runoff (they may be getting 6-12 inches more snow this weekend!).

The concept of hormesis means that the body responds positively to mild stresses, via adaptive mechanisms, by improving the immune system and strengthening cellular defenses, for instance. The paleolithic regimen, intentionally or otherwise, embraces several of these "good stress" techniques, including intermittent fasting, short-term high-intensity exercise, and cold water swimming.

Cold water immersion can help prevents colds and reduce pain in people with various forms of arthritis.

A number of studies, referenced below, describe or hypothesize about several of the beneficial effects of cold-water therapy, such as a gradual increase in white-blood cells among cold-water exposed people, as well as "the stimulation of anti-tumor immunity." One study indicated an increase in the presence of the natural antioxidant glutathione.

I mention "healthy plunges" because it can also be dangerous, yet hearty, to do the typical polar-bear dive into icy waters. Water beneath 16 degrees C. or 61 degrees F. can be difficult to deal with without a triathlon wetsuit, for example. There is a "gasp response" in very cold water, for example, that can imperil humans right off the bat. So watch out before you dive alone into an icy river. If not experienced, don't do it alone, or secure yourself to shore with a rope.

References:

This site is completed devoted to a cold shower's benefits.

From PubMed; Possible stimulation of anti-tumor immunity using repeated cold stress: a hypothesis.

A sports medicine study indicating that post-exercise muscle soreness wasn't reduced that much by cold-water therapy: Ice-water immersion and delayed-onset muscle soreness: a randomized controlled trial.

Adapted cold shower as a potential treatment for depression.

A study showing that cold-water immersion may benefit vascular function.

The Bad, The Bad, And The Ugly

2010-04-24T10:33:00.000-07:00

I lost a family tussle over buying some breakfast cereal at the market (I can count some nutritional victories :) Hey at least I'm trying. I could just be another couch-potato Dad with a "let them eat cake" attitude. We ended up coming home with Special K. What's wrong with that? I used to eat a lot of cereal, and I'm still alive and kicking. I'll tell you why I steer clear of this typical commercial cereal. Because it isn't food. This substance is some kind of nebulous manufactured item. Just look at its six leading ingredients.

rice; a container of empty calories and a carbohydrate that has a tendency to result in greater insulin secretions than healthy fats and proteins (brown rice, soaked for a while, would be better).

wheat gluten, to which many are intolerant, as much as 15 percent of all people. About one in 200 people have Celiac disease, an autoimmune disorder that is triggered by a reaction to certain gluten proteins.

sugar, decidedly a toxic substance in the amounts most Americans, for instance, consume;

defatted wheat germ; the embryo of the wheat seed that has possibly been soaked in industrial solvents (yuck!);

salt, copious in processed foods and people get way too much of it in the western diet;

high fructose corn syrup; one of the truly disastrous substances of the modern diet, the excessive consumption of which is probably the reason why some young people are being diagnosed with fatty liver disease.

Obviously, Special K and the like is an unhealthy, heavily processed neolithic food.

Cramponing and The Moose

2010-04-21T06:41:00.000-07:00

I woke up early this morning, put some crampons on my hiking boots, and clomped my way up Stein's Run on Sugarbush. The picture of Steins is from about two weeks ago. Climbing ski areas in the snow (after they're closed) is good practice for alpine climbing. I started climbing at 6:30 AM to make sure the snow was still hard (it was 41 degrees, barely cold enough). It's much easier to climb steep snow slopes with crampons and trekking poles, once you get used to the slightly bow-legged method. And you should never forget they're on because they are really sharp. I felt really good and climbed the whole steep run in 31 minutes, just keeping a steady pace, but not purposely going too fast. I've watched the way Swiss climbers do it; they keep this very metronomic, economical pace, a predictable tap-tap with the poles, but never seem to be going too fast.

I got to the top and swung around to another part of the mountain to descend the trails called Snowball and Spring Fling, just to keep the feeling of having the crampons on my feet.

I looked up after about five minutes and not far away are a big brown moose and her calf! The adult moose was the size of a large horse, maybe bigger (they can be up to 1,000 pounds), with dark brown fur. Maybe 150-200 yards away. The picture is from Wikipedia.

Of course I didn't have a camera. I stood there watching, never having seen a pair like this before, when I thought, a female moose will certainly charge if she feels her calf is threatened. Get those things off your boots! So I took the crampons off and stood there watching a while. The moose looked at me, vaguely interested, then put her head back down and munched. I returned via the Moonshine trail, to give the lady some elbow room, but by then they had probably wandered back into the woods. The VT moose population is only estimated at 2,100.

I think the moose actually liked the ski area in the early morning because of the paths through the woods and the mucky, mossy, grassy stuff to eat.

Still Trudging Through Snow, and Enjoying It

2010-04-20T11:40:00.000-07:00

I've been hiking up the Lincoln Gap road in Vermont (which is also a killer bike ride) then hanging a left on to the Long Trail and hiking up another mile or so to a nice spot called Sunset Ledge.

They are nice two-hour round-trips, easy to bounce back from the next day, and represent my first bit of climbing training for this year. I distinguish them from running in that my heart rate never goes over 100 (unless I throw in some short sprints, which I have lately), but they involve natural compound movements like, well, climbing.

I'll be back on a bike soon. When I combine hiking with sprints and weight lifting (including body-weight routines like inverted push-ups and pull-ups), it feels like I am touching all the bases, a complete fitness routine.

Then there was party-animal Scotty enoying the final downhill skiing two weeks ago in 82 degrees F.!

The Spartanrace in Burlington, Vermont on May 16 looks promising. Maybe a little silly, and crazy, as in getting run over by energetic but out-of-control 22-year-olds. It's only a two-mile run but includes, from their somewhat sparse description, challenging obstacles along the way, like cargo-net climbs, inclined walls, and balance beams, maybe a parcourse on steroids. This would mostly fit the kind of training I've been doing lately. I thought I might try it (there's a 51-60 age group division), but I also don't want to get injured.

The New Competition: Healthy Aging, Healthy Living

2010-04-15T17:15:00.000-07:00

When I stopped competing in road races and triathlons about a year and a half ago, for reasons that should be obvious if you've been reading some of the posts here, it really left a void. In some cases it felt like I had sort of dropped out of a network of athletes. I had been competing in my age group throughout the year, and I missed seeing the usual competitors, the adrenaline pump, the excitement prior to start time, then the inevitable boost in self esteem or conversely the challenge and disappointment of not yet reaching a goal. At any rate, it was an important part of most weekends, until I found out that heavy endurance racing was not consistent with healthy longevity.

My young son even told me to start racing again, so he could watch.

With occasional big mountain hikes and other activities like downhill skiing, not all the adrenaline boosts have gone away. However, neither does the competitive flame have to flicker out, for those of us who no longer jump into a lot of steady-state endurance races. Why don't we compete on health? Call it the New Competition. Who can add the most lean body mass in six months; improve pull-ups or bench presses by the greatest increments; lower the blood pressure to the most optimum level, keep body fat under 10 percent for the longest time, for us over-50 guys, for example. Not only would this emphasis stoke the fires of competition, it would probably save hundreds of billions of dollars per year in health costs if we all competed on these parameters. How's that for health care reform. What do you think?

Sprints, Ratios, And A Look Inside A Meal

2010-04-12T10:24:00.000-07:00

I just started sprint training now that winter is (mostly) finished, and I find I jumped into it a little too quickly. I did a set of all-out beach sprints yesterday, stopping at seven, then I had pretty tight hamstrings afterward. The problem was bunching together two sprint sessions close together, too early in the season (Wednesday followed by Sunday). Spring fever; too enthusiastic. Your body will tell you when it needs more time to adapt to the resumption of a different kind of high-intensity activity.

An addendum to my "paleo" overview: the importance of keeping in mind a couple of ratios that modern factory-food diets have thrown out of whack. The omega-6 fatty acids to omega-3 ratio (around 2-3 to 1 is ideal; the typical American's diet is more like 20-1 or greater); and the potassium to sodium ratio, which should be around 3.5 to 1, but is often fractional (more sodium than potassium) in the Western diet.

It is largely not necessary and tedious to hyperanalyze everything you're eating. It is however interesting to on occasion use the handy tool fitday.com to see what's going on with these ratios, for instance. I do it about once per month or less.

The image shows breakfast yesterday. The ratios for this omelet/bacon/avocado/fruit combo (a bit less than one-third of the calories for the day) were 7-1 for the omega 6-3 component, and about 1.2 - 1 for potassium - sodium. Both were less than optimal. The culprits for omega 6 were the avocado and bacon, which have 15-1 and 20-1 ratios respectively. Cheddar cheese and strawberries by the way have good ratios, less than 2-1, according to nutritiondata.com. The overall ratio isn't that bad (an avocado has so many other good qualities, such as lots of potassium and monounsaturated fats).

The substitution of pastured eggs (which I didn't have then) would have lowered the ratio to around 5-1. Besides, the rest of the day's foods tend to "even the score" on the Omega-3 side: fish, lots of veggies, and often a half teaspoon of Carlson's fish oil (providing about 800 mg of Omega 3), not too mention the total abstinence from processed foods and industrial vegetable oils.

The upshot is that an occasional "box score" like this one can help make sure that you are walking the walk, when it comes to using these Paleolithic strategies.

Ode To The Pastured Egg

2010-04-08T08:17:00.000-07:00

I usually try to load up a cooler with pastured eggs from Gaylord Farm in Vermont when I'm passing through. I like the fact that they are grass-fed and therefore more nutritious and tasty, much more nutritious than industrially produced eggs offered at the typical mega-supermarket, according to an article in Mother Earth News.

The article points out that, based on lab tests of the eggs from hens raised on pastures as opposed to factory-farm chickens, the pastured eggs have significantly more Omega 3 fatty acids, and vitamins A, D, and E. About how much more?

I looked at a table that a reproduction of the article shows; a PDF file. The pastured eggs contained on average (14 farms tested) 660 mg of Omega 3s or 0.66 gram (based on 100 grams of egg, or about 1.6 eggs), about three times as much as a factory egg. The grass-fed eggs contained almost four times the vitamin E and twice the vitamin A. So when you eat three of those eggs in an omelet, you're most likely getting more than a gram of Omega 3s. Factor that in with your supplement strategy for Omega 3 fats (don't get too much Omega 3).

What about the much touted vitamin D? A couple of eggs from pastured hens may give you from 100 - 200 IU of D (but they don't specify exactly whether it's D3). At any rate, eggs from a hen that eats grass and insects seem to be significantly more nutritious on several fronts compared to their factory-produced, grain- and soy-fed counterparts. Omega 3 eggs appear to be an acceptable alternative to factory-farm eggs, when you cannot obtain pastured, according to the excellent blog Whole health Source.

First Sprint Workout for 2010

2010-04-07T07:48:00.000-07:00

The winter in New England has drawn to a close, so I ventured out today for my first sprint workout. This is a "get the cobwebs out" workout, since unlike previous winters, I have done zero running. Absolutely none, for the better part of five months. I have done a lot of leg-work though: downhill skiing, lots of weights, and some uphill walking. My goal is to work up (within several weeks) to a complete set of Tabata sprints: 8 repetitions of 20-second all-out sprints with 10 second rests.

I use a soccer field and I run barefoot on the grass. My guess is that the field is 110 yards (a regulation field can be between 100-130 yards). My warmup consisted of jogging to the endline of one the local fields (less than 2 minutes), a little stretching, two half-field "fast jogs" to reacquaint my body with the sprint technique, and about 50 jumping jacks. The warmup was a little less than 10 minutes. Then I did 4 half-field sprints at about 90 percent. Here in the beginning of the sprint season, I'm taking comfortable, untimed maybe 45 sec. rests between intervals.

My all-out full-field sprints were 17, 16, and 19 seconds respectively. My record last year, after a lot of sprint training, was 14.5 secs., so I think that I have a good chance to best that this year. Beyond the stats,how you feel generally during a sprint session is a very good measure to keep track of, and whereas I'm not close to being able to do a decent Tabata protocol (that's to be expected), I went faster and felt better than I thought I would. I went by the old nostrum, "do one less interval than you think you can," so I didn't do a fourth 110-yard sprint. The whole thing took about 20 minutes. I'm going to try to do sprints weekly. It's a nice outdoor form of high-intensity training (HIT).

Paleo in Brief

2010-04-06T07:57:00.000-07:00

I thought some might appreciate a bite-size briefing (< 1000 words), on what "paleo" represents, so here goes. I'm going to avoid the usual polemical debates about whether Stone Age people were healthy or not (a bit of a red herring, since we know that current and recent hunter-gatherer peoples like the Kitava in Papua New Guinea or the Masai in Africa are or were healthier than typical modern people).

To get the anthropological terms out of the way, paleo is short for the Paleolithic era, the Stone Age period that began up to 2.6 million years ago and eventually led to the agricultural Neolithic period about 12,000 years ago. I also like the term ancestral health to describe this dietary and lifestyle discipline.

The gist of the matter is that our deep past, our evolutionary history, provides the clues for how to stay healthy (e.g., what didn't they eat; how long do they spend outdoors, getting sun, and not sitting?) not Big Pharma or modern tech.

Paleo often seems to be an anti-modernity movement, associating modernity with sedentism, eating fake food, and squandering time using gadgets like iPods and TV, although many of its proponents will vigorously contest the notion that they reject the modern world. They want to borrow the good from our evolutionary heritage, and adapt those concepts to modern living.

In essence, the theory goes, we've evolved during those hundreds of thousands of years leading up to the Neolithic period to eat mostly veggies (such as of the green leafy variety), fruits (preferably low-sugar like berries), fish and a variety of other animal meats, including organ meats like liver and brain; nuts, and some seeds.

Our current diet, however, has drastically changed in the last 30-50 years to emphasize refined sugar in all of its manifestations, fructose (as in the infamous high fructose corn syrup), hydrogenated or trans fats, and industrial seed oils like corn, soy, and safflower oil that are ubiquitous in processed and fast foods, as well as wheat and other antinutrients that were only introduced at most a few tens of thousands of years ago.

The argument is strong that the over consumption of the latter substances (not fats, which have been mistakenly maligned) has led to an alarming increase in chronic disease, such as diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. The usual suspects in the modern diet are often referred to critically as Neolithic foods or agents (e.g., sugar, trans fats).

The role that diet and lifestyle plays in these illnesses had led people to refer to them as diseases of affluence or civilization. Which further implies that we have the freedom to avoid them, which explains much of the popularity of the dietary side of the paleo regimen.

The ancestral health approach to diet involves eating higher fat and higher protein as part of fish, meats, veggies, and fruit, completely eliminating refined sugar and most refined flour, as well as all processed food.

The amount of carbs consumed and advocated can greatly vary among paleo types, from zero carb to 200 or more grams per day. The usual rule of thumb is eat carbs only in a nutritious package (e.g., berries, spinach, sweet potatoes, avocados; broccoli).

Some "hardcore" or orthodox paleo eaters avoid dairy, viewing it as Neolithic, but I eat a lot of pasture-derived eggs, cheeses, and some Greek-strained yogurt. I have bread rarely (but still have it); "cheats" are generally allowed among "paleos"; but then again, it depends on how orthodox you are in your approach. No pizza, rice, pancakes, bagels, scones, ice cream, etc. for me. I make up for the lack of desert by eating a bit of 100% cacao ghiradelli chocolate on many days (it's rich tasting and has healthy fats and minerals). Caloric restriction is generally not necessary.

Intermittent fasting and high-intensity exercise are also important components of the regimen, along with diet. Much hard biochemical evidence lies behind the paleo dietary choices, such as the central role the hormone insulin plays, and retaining sensitivity to your own insulin, in avoiding metabolic illnesses like obesity and diabetes. The thinking goes that a healthy person helps maintain low fasting insulin levels by fasting once in a while, a "good stress," or only eating in a narrow window. The upshot is that science shows that fasting in a reasonable manner (say eating only from 10 AM to 7 PM) helps you maintain a healthy metabolism.

Paleo also stresses high intensity workouts (e.g., sprints,
short in duration, hard weight-lifting sessions) over endurance exercise like running and cycling (so-called "chronic cardio"), which doesn't turn out to be healthy in the long run.

That's paleo in a nutshell: higher fat (fish, avocados, eggs, quality
cheeses, meats, tons of salad, veggies, etc.), grass-fed beef, game, and poultry, nuts and berries for snacks; no processed or refined carbs, intermittent fasting (IF), and high intensity workouts. And lots of sleep.

Ancestral Health Symposium Looks Intriguing In 2011

2010-04-05T07:00:00.000-07:00

An Ancestral Health Symposium involving several luminaries in the Paleolithic fitness and health realm that I've followed over the last year will be held in UCLA some time in 2011. It looks intriguing to say the least. Check out the proposed presenters, just about every scientist, medical expert, and paleo fitness and dietary guru that I can imagine has been invited.

"Recently, research scientists, physicians, health experts/professionals, and e-patients have organized online around a new direction in physiology that respects our evolutionary heritage as human beings," the web site for the gathering explains. You can bet I'll be there listening in, if I can swing the trip.

NFL Discovers The Paleo Regimen; I Rediscover Winter

2010-03-26T14:47:00.000-07:00

ESPN recently profiled an NFL lineman who's impressing his teammates by eating a paleo diet and maintaining 8 percent body fat amid his 300 pounds (that's a lot of lean body mass!). The mainstream is really discovering the Paleolithic regimen, particularly the dietary side, which has reached a critical mass, what with the Colbert Report video, a NYT article, etc. mostly because it works, not for phony reasons, in my humble opinion.

The football player mentions the usual challenge of not being able to find paleo food in public while you travel, so he's planning to start his own Paleo Brands business. I expect to see a lot of "Paleolithic" spin-offs pretty soon, like restaurants and modified energy bars.

I have my own idea for an energy bar I've been toying with. More on that later...

I think the "hard to get paleo in airports" feature is a good thing; you eat less crap on the run and learn to bring your own stuff, like bags of nuts and seeds. That's what I eat on the slopes, where it's in the 20s today in Vermont, and is expected to be single digits later. The snow lingers...as does the outdoor cold exercise.

The Thrill of Brief Intensity; The Agony of Ultra Endurance

2010-03-18T14:51:00.000-07:00

That is...the agony in respect to its effect on the body.

Here's what I did early this morning. I dropped off my daughter at school, took a few more sips of coffee, then hit the gym nearby, for no more than fifteen minutes. In the first 10 minutes, in this order, I did 32 dips, 10 pull-ups, two sets of bicep curls (as a kind if break in the flow), 10 more pull-ups with a different grip, then 2 sets of cable pull-downs (about 8 reps at 135, followed by 6 at 150 lbs.). At this point I felt great; strong, enlivened. Then the final five minutes involved 6 more wide-grip pull-ups (my upper body had reached its maximum strength for that narrow time frame), and a few minutes of flutter kicks, which I'm trying to get better at.

It's a sneaky kind of regimen designed to stress the body with an early-morning wake-up call, as well as to give myself credit for trying hard at something athletic ("there, I'm done for the day").

Brief high intensity work-outs are the alternative to ultra endurance training for hours at low- or mid-levels of exertion. A meeting of the American College of Cardiology released the findings of a small study this week indicating that marathon training damages the cardiovascular system. The study found specifically that a group of runners who regularly train for marathons had higher blood pressure and stiffer aortas than a control group, according to the linked press report. I have not read or seen the study itself. Men's Health has chimed in on this issue at least once, and certainly the anecdotal evidence points to the greater efficacy of "less is more" type training versus steady-state endurance running, particularly as you age and aim for healthy longevity.

I used to do this kind of endurance training, and now I have lower body fat, more lean body mass, almost equivalent endurance, and spend far less time exercising with a Paleolithic fitness approach (accepting the occasional long ski days and mountain hikes, which I still view as properly paleo).

Good Potassium Ratios

2010-03-17T12:09:00.000-07:00

Now that we're on the subject of potassium, I thought I'd mention a few foods, via nutritiondata.com, that represent very good sources of potassium and potassium-to-sodium ratios:

med size kiwi: 237 -2

5-6 ounces salmon: 967 - 86

one large stalk cooked broccoli: 820 - 115

4 ounces grass-fed ground bison: 353 - 76

medium-sized lemon: 80 -1

One cup raw spinach: 167 -24

A California avocado: 689 mg - 11

One cup raspberries: 186 - 1

One cup cherry tomates: 147 - 3

One cup blueberries: 114 -1

One medium banana (but watch the sugar!): 422 mg - 1

In other words, a small piece of wild salmon gives you about 1000 mg (or one gram) of potassium, and confers a potassium-to-sodium ratio of more than 10-1.