Anaerobic News

Why Eating Fat Doesn’t Make You Fat

For all you Paleo people out there… here is more proof that you’re on the right track. It may come as no surprise that there have been plenty of scientific findings in recent decades outlining how fat isn’t so bad for you after all. One of the main reasons behind America’s ballooning girth – surprise surprise – is carbohydrates. Bread and pasta, the very things that the government once advertised as the foundation of a healthy diet in the food pyramids, is actually the very thing that is destroying our health.

Check out this fascinating and informative infographic about how our bodies ingest food and why certain foods make us fat. The process may surprise you…

Clicking the image below will enlarge it in another window….

A little silly… but it goes to show that we only really started eating the way we do in the last 5,000 years or so.

By Peter Attia on WarOnInsulin.com

Any discussion on the culpability of poor nutrition as the cause of our health woes begins with a discussion on sugar. One of the world’s experts on this topic is Dr. Robert Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist at UCSF.  Dr. Lustig has great experience treating children with obesity and is really on the front lines of what is becoming an epidemic of childhood obesity.  About two-and-a-half years ago, he gave a lecture on the perils of fructose (fruit sugar, which also makes up half of table sugar and high fructose corn syrup). It’s about 90 minutes in length, but the time goes by pretty quickly as Dr. Lustig is an engaging speaker. In addition, Gary Taubes wrote a great piece on sugar toxicity in the NY Times Magazine last year, which references the work of Dr. Lustig.  You can find it here.  Gary’s article on this topic was the fourth most read feature of 2011 on NYTimes.com (and the most read of all health-related topics).   Here’s the video of Dr. Lustig’s lecture:

I’ve highlighted the key points (with corresponding time in video), for those who may not want to watch the video in its entirety:

• 0:09:40 – Helpful summary showing the reduction in fat consumption in the U.S. from 1960 to 2000 (about 45% to 30%) and the concomitant rise in obesity (about 12% to 31%) [Which, of course, doesn't "prove" anything, it's just another correlation.]
• 0:23:00 – Change in fructose consumption over time: Prior to WWII (16-24 gm/day); 1977-78 USDA survey (37 gm/day); 1994 NHANES III (54.7 gm/day); Adolescents today (73 gm/day).
• 0:24:00– Perfect political storm of 3 events:
  • Nixon and USDA secretary (1973) – insistence to stabilize/reduce food prices.
  • Invention of High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS), which was half the price of cane sugar and enabled cheap substitution.
  • USDA, ADA, AHA, AMA – all call for reduction in fat intake.  Why? (For a quick primer on “cholesterol,” you may want to check my previous post on, What is cholesterol?)
    • Early 1970’s – LDL-C (The so-called “bad” cholesterol) is discovered (more specifically, a test to measure LDL-C is discovered)
    • Mid 1970’s – Observation that dietary fat is correlated with rising LDL-C (“A implies B”) in a subset of people.
    • Late 1970’s – Observation that elevated LDL-C is correlated with heart disease and cerebrovascular disease (“B implies C”) [Note: It's not actually clear this correlation has causation attached to it, in fact most evidence today would tell us that elevated LDL-C does not lead to heart disease and stroke.]
    • Early 1980’s – The following connection is (erroneously) made: A implies B, and B implies C, hence A implies C, so no-A means no-C.  [I guess it’s easy to see how an untrained person could make this mistake, but anyone who has taken even an intro course in logic knows that if A implies C, it isnot the case no-A implies no-C, it is only the case that no-C implies no-A. It’s hard to believe such poor logic was, and is, used to drive health policy. Last editorial point on this – any card-carrying lipidologist today will tell you that the so-called “bad” LDL-C is as relevant to your getting heart disease as your eye color.  Heart disease is caused by lipoprotein particles carrying oxysterols into your artery walls.  This is not measured or reasonably predicted by LDL-C.]
• 0:33:00 – Overview of Ancel Keys’ flawed “Seven countries study:” Showed the correlation of fat intake and coronary mortality, but failed to explain the cross correlation of sucrose with the fat (that is, sugar consumption rose too, but this was ignored in the analysis).
• 0:58:00 – Fructose metabolism overview (technical, but interesting – feel free to skip if you don’t like biochemistry): Fructose requires more ATP for the first step in its metabolism (fructose to fructose-1-P) than glucose.  This requires an AMP scavenger to recycle the ADP and AMP.  AMP goes to IMP, which goes to uric acid… READ MORE

A great post from CrossFitLisbeth.com

If I think you can take it, I’ll pick on you. Harass you, harangue you, pester you to lift better, think better, be better. Right up until you want to make a little voodoo doll and stab the shit out of me with some metal pins. You might be angry, but I know you’re strong enough to handle the storm.

If I think that you can’t handle the storm, that you might break or cry or whimper under duress, I’m going to take a totally different approach. Your work might suck but you’ll get what appears to be less criticism. I have to approach you a totally different way. Dole out the lessons slowly, in little bites, over a longer period of time. We’re headed toward the same end, just taking a different, longer road. But the destination is the same: success.

See, success in one path, or many paths, is not easy.It’s not enough to have a gift, or a talent, or a skill set. Not enough to have drive, persistence, and dedication. You need to bring it all — and at the right time. So a good coach can be a big old pain in the ass. They’ll bug you to hit the right points, the right speed, the right bar path. They know if you have the talent and the heart and the gumption and the soul — and they want to see you bring it all. Their job is to to help you reach your potential. It’s not always easy, but it’s worth it. In the end, you’ll both be better people because of good coaching, whether it’s in the gym or in school or the home or whatever. Good coaches have many names: friend, parent, partner. They’re in more areas of your life than you realize. Anyone helping you to be better is coaching you, whether you think of them in this light or not.

So, whether you’re the one making the voodoo doll or you’re the one getting pins to the head, take heart.A message is getting through. Someone is getting better. And that’s why we’re all here.

By Tyler Graham, coauthor of The Happiness Diet
in HuffingtonPost.com

1: Deciphering food label ingredients leads to unappetizing results. Take the innocuous-sounding castoreum, which is used to enhance the flavor of puddings, candies, and some frozen dairy desserts. You might be surprised to know that it’s derived from beavers–beaver anal glands, specifically.

2: Many foods get their red coloring–”carmine”–from ground-up insect shells that can cause severe allergic reactions in some people.

3: The greater the number of cheap cuts of meat ground into a single patty, the greater the risk of contamination with E. coli. A standard fast-food burger contains the trimmings of dozens of cows raised around the globe.

4: According to research from UCLA, it takes only two months to lower levels of brain chemicals responsible for learning and memory (like BDNF) on a steady diet of processed foods.

5: Processed food is only as good as its packaging: In the summer of last year, Kellogg’s recalled 28 million boxes of cereal because a compound in the box lining (the company wouldn’t say what) was giving off a foul smell and tainting the taste of the boxed food.

See the other 5 reasons…

Popeye’s claim that “I am strong to the finish because I eat all my spinach” is scientifically correct, a study has found.

By Richard Alleyne, Science Correspondent
In Telegraph.co.uk

Researchers have discovered that eating a bowl of spinach a day makes your muscles “profoundly” more efficient. They found that eating 300g of the vegetable reduced the amount of oxygen needed to power muscles by as much as five per cent when exercising.

The effect is so powerful it works after just three days. The secret is not iron but nitrates which are abundant in the vegetable. These chemicals make the mitochondria – the “engine rooms” of every cell – more efficient, they found.

“It is like a fuel additive for your muscles – it makes them run much more smoothly and efficiently,” said the lead author Dr Eddie Weitzberg of the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden.

Dr Wietzberg, who reported his findings in the journal Cell Metabolism, fed people pure nitrate supplements – the equivalent to the amount in a plate of spinach – every day for three days. At the beginning and end of the experiment they were made to pedal strenuously on an exercise bike while their oxygen intake was measured via a tube to the mouth.

It was found that the difference in energy in take was between three and five per cent – a significant figure. Spinach is well known as the superfood that gave Popeye the Sailor Man his bulging muscles. The famous cartoon character, who dates back to the 1930s, pops open a can of spinach whenever he needs to get out of trouble… Read More

The company started with its own out-of-shape employees to spark a fitness revolution — as well as build confidence and camaraderie

By Jenn Abelson in the BostonGlobe.com

‘‘I was horrified in the beginning and crying like a baby,’’ said Reebok executive Peggy Baker of her CrossFit classes. ‘‘But I still come.’’

CANTON – To be blunt, Peggy Baker is an overweight, middle-age diabetic. Until last year, she had never lifted a kettlebell or done a box jump in her life.

The 54-year-old is also a Reebok employee and the poster child for the company’s new mission: to get consumers moving by setting an example with its own workforce.

Baker is one of about 425 employees at Reebok who are taking part in a new fitness program that is transforming the sneaker maker’s Canton headquarters. Participants lost over 4,000 pounds collectively during 2011 – roughly the weight of an small SUV.

These workouts, called CrossFit, combine sprinting, gymnastics, powerlifting, kettlebell training, weightlifting, rowing, and medicine ball training, among other activities. The program is making waves at Reebok and gaining traction as one of the fastest-growing fitness movements in the United States. Reebok is capitalizing on the momentum with its first global marketing campaign featuring CrossFit, which will air during Sunday’s NFL divisional playoff between the New York Giants and Green Bay Packers.

The TV spot will feature chiseled athletes, but it also aims to show that CrossFit is as much about community, confidence building, competition, and camaraderie as it is about exercise and training… READ MORE

From ColeBradburn.com

Sometimes figuring the ins & outs of Paleo can be a little difficult. Even if it is one of the simplest diets on the planet, it can be complicated by the vast array of available food out there. Do you have questions about the Paleo diet? Are you having trouble figuring out whats good and whats bad to put in your body?  Follow the flow chart below to see if you are eating the right foods.

Click Here for an enlarged version.

By Amy Kubal, MS, RD on RobbWolf.com

It’s often difficult for kids to understand why they can’t be like “everyone else”.  They see their friend’s parents serving pasta, pizza, macaroni and cheese, etc. and that’s what they want too.  Unfortunately they are too young to completely understand the long term benefits of paleo eating and are more interested in the ‘instant gratification’ that comes with Twinkies and French fries.  Their taste buds have been conditioned to like sweet, creamy, carbohydrate rich foods.

In order to make the transition to paleo easier:

• Let your children play an active part in the selection and preparation of their food and meals.
• Take them to the store with you and let them choose a new fruit or vegetable to try.
• Plan menus and meals together – provide them with two or three meal options for each day and let them take turns deciding what will get put on the menu.
• Let them look at paleo cookbooks and choose new recipes to try.
• In the kitchen have them help wash and chop vegetables, measure ingredients, toss salads, mix ingredients, etc.  Let them contribute to the meal – this will increase the chances that they will try the food.
• Also it may be helpful to incorporate one or two non-paleo meals each week.   If they know that it’s okay to still have pizza once and a while and they can see it coming on the week’s menu it may prevent some of the rebellion.  When you do let the kids indulge do your best to keep it gluten free; their growing bodies will appreciate it!!   A great goal would is a household that is 80/20; that is 80% of the time paleo with the other 20% being more ‘standard’.
• Lastly, never force the kids to eat.  Provide the food and let them decide.  If they refuse to eat and throw a fit – ignore it.  By arguing and pleading you only reinforce the behavior giving them attention and increasing the likelihood of it happening again.  Keep meal time fun and enjoyable eating should not be stressful.

Amy Kubal is a Registered “Paleo” Dietitian and the ring leader of Robb’s RD consulting team. She works with a wide range of clients from competitive athletes to those dealing with complex health problems. Check out her bio and consulting options, and her blog Fuel As Rx to get your Paleo nutrition fix.

From NewBalance.com

Agility drills. Linear exercises. Lateral movements. Specialized motions need specialized shoes. One of the most common mistakes people seeking to get in shape make is not quite understanding the importance of proper footwear. At New Balance, we know that you have questions—and we have answers.

Generally, running and jogging shoes are built for forward motion—that is, they’re good for heel strike to toe-off. They have an emphasis on thicker heels and midsoles with more flexiblility in the toe area, and have thicker overall cushioning that allows for shock absorption during impact. This helps transfer energy from legs to feet and into the ground as runners move along. The soles of running shoes are curved so that the front tip of the shoe is arched upward and has distinct treads—both of which also aid in the forward running motion.

Training exercises take advantage of repeated movements to condition specific parts of the body. This could mean anything from lateral moves in an aerobics class to the high impact of kickboxing to the repeated motion of weight lifting. Training shoes are designed with this variety of uses in mind. They feature characteristics like flexibility in the forefront of the shoe to allow for more agility and added support on the sides to aid in lateral movement, with added cushioning placed in key areas of the shoe for shock absorbtion. This combination of support, flexibility and cushioning allow athletes to easily move from weight lifting exercises like squats along to more flexible movements like lunges, while accommodating linear movements for warm-up such as a brief walk or light jog. The soles of training shoes usually have a very supportive heel and slight treads since they’re not intended for running on the road.

For over a hundred years, New Balance has been renowned for our running shoes—assisting the most casual of runners to the elite members of Team New Balance in their pursuit of excellence. But if you’re after a shoe to aid your weight training regimen or better support your aerobics endeavors, try on a pair from our training collection. We promise you won’t be disappointed.