The Truth, The Whole Truth And Nothing But The Truth

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Linda Hahn's Results Doing The Cure

My wife Linda finished doing the Eades 6 Weeks Cure for the Middle-Aged Middle. She did quite well if I may say so.

Linda lost a total of 11 pounds in 6 weeks. This is excellent by anyone standards. All with no added physical activity.

I'd like to see a single study showing better results than this while including added physical activity. All she did was two, 15 minute strength sessions which came to a total of 15 minutes of total exercise per week. But she was doing this before.

Her lean mass went from 107.41 pounds on August 20th to 105.5 pounds on October 2nd. This loss of lean was accounted for by a half liter of water loss. 1/2 liter weighs 1 pound. Since she lost 2 pounds of lean, 1/2 came from warer, the other 1/2 from lean tissue. A small price to pay for such fantastic results. However, her percentage of lean mass to fat mass went up by 2%. This is more important than her total lean mass.  

Her fat mass went from 44.59 pounds to 39.04 pounds on October 2nd. A loss of 5.5 pounds.

Today she weighed in at 141 pounds with no loss of lean mass. So She went from 152 to 141 - 11 total pounds lost. 9 from fat, 1 from water, 1 from lean tissue.

Here's her electronic body fat printout before and after:

One of the amazing things about this program is that it's, well, really easy to do and to stick to.

If the entire country adopted this eating plan, my predicition is that obesity and adult onset diabetes would virtually vanish in one year - two tops. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Feel free to email me with any questions.

If your thinking of trying The Cure, do so. Don't think - just do. 
 

Primal Body Primal Mind

(I am reposting this blog post as I mistakingly deleted it and all the comments along with a few other older blog posts in my attempt to act like a webmaster. My apologies.)

I just finished reading Primal Body - Primal Mind by Nora T. Gedgaudas and I have to say it is a worthy read.

As well read on the subject of nutrition as I like to think I am, Nora really knows her stuff. Her chapter on carbohydrate metabolism is spot on and served to remind me that every single piece of bread we eat or every little sip of soda we take leads us down the path to premature cellular destruction, meaning, sugar ages us faster.

I've posted this before but I'll say it again - the normal level of blood sugar for the typical adult is about half a teaspoon or ~2 grams (can be slightly more for larger people, less for children). That's it. As Nora puts it:

"The body is literally obsessed with maintaining glucose within minimally normal levels."

A small bagel contains 20 grams of sugar - over 5 times the normal circulating amount. Think about what you eat in a typical day and see if you think you are glycating your way to premature aging and an earlier grave.

None of this is speculation by the way. Sugar is as caustic to our bodies as oxygen is. We need it, but very little of it. Too much and we die.

I urge people to become aware of the damage sugar causes especially for the sake of our children. Educate them. Explain to them why that bowl of Frosted Flakes is a bowl full of cellular death in disguise. And the low fat, homogenized, pasteurized milk that is added to these flakes of fire does not douse them. It doubles the heat by added damaged fats and proteins into the DNA-altering soup.

Most of us are eating in our sleep. Awaken by reading Nora's book.  

Switching to Word Press

I am making the move from TypePad to WordPress. If anything strange happens - lost posts, lost comments, weird redirects, etc. I apologize. this change will be finalized by the end of the weekend.

I am also switching over to moderate comments. Sorry for this but it's necessary. I get too much spam these days.

Word Press will be much more saavy and sophisticated and allow for me to add PDF's and other files.

The address will be www.slowburnfitness.com

Thanks!

Tax on Sugary Food and the Food of Cancer, Obesity and Diabetes

These are two seemingly separate and distinct issues but when you stop and think about them, they have a lot in common.

A recent article in the NY Times discussed the idea of placing taxes on sugary beverages in an effort to curb obesity. While it is true that increased sugar consumption is by far the fastest and quite frankly, the only way to become obese, what's next? A fat tax? An exercise too little tax?

To reduce their circumferential measures, people need to be educated, not taxed.

The proposition of a tax to curb obesity is just our governments way of saying "You Americans are too weak of will and stupid to control yourselves, and we're too lazy and dumb to educate you so, we'll just tax you and profit by it instead." So what else is new.

Lightbulb: What about a reward system rather than one of punishment? EX: If you keep your body weight within 20 pounds of your optimal body composition, you get an income tax reduction. And who cares HOW you do it? You can eat very healthfully and still have a Snickers bar, a can of ginger ale and be no worse for the wear but heavenforfend! Not that I advocate eating this sort of fare, but hey - healthy is healthy. I enjoy my wine and I'm very healthy. Why can't someone enjoy a can of soda without being shaken down?

Here again we see the government looking for their lost keys where the light is better. The cure for obesity, diabetes and perhaps for most cancers and autoimmune disorders is to eat as we would before the advent of agriculture.

Animals in the wild do not get cancer. (Note added September 22nd 2009: What I mean to say by this is it is my opinion that animals in the wild that have no contact with man do not suffer from cancers. Some animals do get cancers in the wild, but it is suspected and theorized that these cancers are caused by environmental pollutants caused by man. Some are caused by viruses but these are rare.) They do not become obese, diabetic, asthmatic or arthritic. Only when humans invite them into their lives or influence their lives and habitats do these ills descend upon them. No, no - it's not because they don't live long enough in the wild to experience these problems. Young humans get cancer, fat and arthritic too.

By cracky, it's what we feed our pets and what we feed ourselves that may very well be THE cause of most of our ills and certainly increases them. We feed our animals and ourselves foods that would never be eaten in our natural habitats. Dog and cat foods are laden with carbohydrates (and other fillers) - a macronutrient that is entirely unnecessary in their diet (or ours for that matter). Carnivores, like us, do not need carbohydrates in any amount to survive and survive quite well, yet it is what the government food pyramid stresses as the main nutrient for humans and what is boasted in most if not all pet foods. I saw a dog food commercial the other day that said: "Now, with carrots and even oatmea!" Oatmeal - for a dog?

From the Dietary Reference Intake which is "a series of reports on the dietary reference values for the intake of nutrients by Americans and Canadians. They include details on the application of statistically valid methods and reviews the roles that macronutrients play in traditional deficiency diseases as well as chronic diseases." DRI's page 275:

"The lower limit of dietary carbohydrate compatible with life apparently is zero, provided that adequate amounts of protein and fat are consumed."

There you have it sportsfans. We need zero carbohydrates in our diet yet carbohydratesmake up over 70% of the govenment food pyramid. Will someone please explain this to me?

Cancer, obesity, diabetes and arthritis do not float in the sky, land on and infect us. You can't breathe them in, get them from an insect or contract them from others. These ills are, for the most part, self inflicted. They arise from what we do and don't eat. FE: Cancer feeds on sugar. We've known this for decades. Carbohydrates are sugars. Remove the sugars and you remove the potential cause of and certainly the food for cancers. Yes my friends, it may very well be that simple. Sounds crazy, right? But why - why does it sound crazy? Stop and think about this for just a moment. Do animals in the wild get cancer? Become obese or diabetic? What do all of of these maladies have in common? The ingestion of excess sugar.

I believe that our society has no idea how brainwahsed and dumbed up and down we have become by clever marketing and advertising. Even Dr. Oz is telling people to eat oatmeal and shun meat. Would you put oatmeal into your dogs food bowl? Heck no. So then why are you putting it into yours - or your childs? Most answer that we are humans and dogs are dogs and thus we have different digestive systems. This is not exactly true.

Let's not tax sugary foods Mr. Obama (not that you're 100% for it). Let's instead educate people how dangerous sugar is in all its forms and put an end to the ills caused by this macronutrient once and for all. I am calling for a 3 month moratorium on sugar and grain based carbohydrates. Rather than all join hands and walk for the cure, let's instead join minds and eat for it.

Fitness Tests for Kids

A reader commented on a post I did on fitness testing. He said:

Dear Fred,

After reading your artical on the fitness gram test administerd by the NYC schools it was interesting to hear someone elses point of view. Currently we have been administering the test in our school system for eight years. Many of the concerns you point out have also been debated here through the years. My biggest concerns as an educator are accuracy of the results along with consistency with how the test is given from school to school.
At best I see it as an instrument to help student understand personal resposibility for their own health and fitness.
In the 2010-11 school year Georgia will begin requiring a fitness assesment on all students 1st thru 12th grade. Do you have recommendations for a better test instrument that can be given in a timely and effective manner?

My reply:

Well, fitness testing is not the answer that's for sure. The timeliest test is none at all.

The real test for fitness for kids is general health and markers for inflammation as well as signs of obesity and metabolic syndrome.

If the child is lean, has no abnormal blood markers for inflammation, then all is basically well. Why test their fitness?

The BIG issue is food. FE: Whole grains are NOT healthful. Neither is low fat milk or low fat products. Carbohydrates contribute to adiposity, overeating, type II diabetes and inflammation. 

There is no need to test children for fitness. Kids that are healthy are fit by default. If a kid like sports, fine. If not, fine too. ALL kids who eat healthfully will sleep well and will have excess energy to play and play they will. They always have until recently as the bulk of our food has become laden with fructose which is stored as fat making the child hungry and hour after she eats.

Disordered eating leads to eating disorders.

Feed a child fat and meats, vegetables and some fruit only and everything else will fall into place naturally.

Lean Times

While John Cloud erred in several ways in his Time magazine article titled Why Exercise Won’t Make You Thin, he's correct on the fat loss issue. Many people including the Surgeon General have lambasted Mr. Cloud for his candor and scientifically sound information on getting svelte.

 What he was saying is that exercise does not affect fat loss much if at all. And research on the subject of exercise and fat loss supports his statement time and time again. Even the American College of Sports Medicine agrees that exercise does little to affect it as we’ll learn shortly.

 The knee-jerk reactions that bombarded the internet lambasting Cloud for the article which include Jake Steinfeld (the Jake of  Body by Jake Fame) only serve to keep people fat and injured.  They assume that Cloud is saying that exercise is not good for us or that it provides no benefit. That is not what John Cloud was saying. And he does, in fact, make mention of the many benefits of exercise. In fact he even says at the end of the article “You should exercise to improve your health…” Again, the title of the article is "Why Exercise Won't Make You Thin." And it won't. It never has and that is a fact of science. Good for John for having the guts to reveal this information and help us all get closer to the truth and, perhaps, save us from an orthopedic injury.

 Jake Steinfield, who may I say I respect and admire, had this to say on his Huffington Post blog:

 “Cloud states that the American College of Sports Medicine and the American Heart Association's guidelines regarding weight loss and exercise are unrealistic, especially for those with jobs or those looking for jobs. The guidelines encourage exercise for 60 to 90 minutes on most days of the week. What he fails to mention is that they also say that "research shows that moderate-intensity physical activity can be accumulated throughout the day in 10-minute bouts, which can be just as effective as exercising for 30 minutes straight. This can be useful when trying to fit physical activity into a busy schedule."

 What Jake neglects to mention is that, unfortunately for those who seek to lose weight via exercise, the ACSM admits exercise doesn’t work. From the AHA/ ACSM paper titled: Physical Activity and Public Health. Updated Recommendation for Adults From the American College of Sports Medicine and the American Heart Association (page 7):

 “It is reasonable to assume that persons with relatively high daily energy expenditures would be less likely to gain weight over time, compared with those who have low energy expenditures. So far, data to support this hypothesis are not particularly compelling.”

 Also from Jake’s Huff Post blog (he is quoting Dr. Robert Sallis, past president of the American College of Sports Medicine): 

"If exercise were a pharmaceutical it would be the most potent drug ever invented. Exercise has been clearly proven to prevent and treat chronic diseases and lower mortality rates. From a scientific perspective, any attempt to discredit the value of exercise is just laughable and potentially very harmful to the public. As a physician who works hard to get patients more active, I find it very irresponsible for Time magazine to run a story that so misrepresents the facts."

Well, Dr. Sallis isn’t quite correct. All of the studies done on exercise that are used as iron clad proof that exercise prevents and treats chronic disease and lowers mortality rates are epidemiological / observational studies. These types of studies are not controlled research studies. They can only suggest an association - they do not prove cause and effect. Just because people who exercise regulary live longer and are generally healthier than those who don’t doesn’t mean that the exercise caused these benefits.

But why? Why does exercise have little to no effect on fat loss? There are many reasons including increased appetite and being more sedentary after the workout. An interesting example of this was watching my daughters ride their bikes around Mackinac Island last week while we were on vacation and after the 8 mile ride all they wanted to do was sit in bed and read.

But the most important issue is the understanding of the language of fat loss. What tells the body to release fat from the fat cells?

Fat loss is not a numbers game. In other words, a calorie is not always just a calorie. Fat loss is a hormonal game. Fat is not released from the fat cells because you burn calories doing exercise. No one loses fat without altering their diet and sticking to that alteration. And the specific alteration is a reduction in carbohydrates, not necessarily calories, which in turn reduces insulin secretion, which in turn allows the lipids to be released form the fat cell. That's the biochemistry. We don't get to vote on it. There are other issues, but this is far and away the most critical.

And why do so many experts and the ACSM assume exercise will work even though time and time again research fails to support the assumption. So too do the failures of millions of Americans who try to shed the pounds by sweating to the oldies.

A thorough read of Gary Taubes' book Good Calories Bad Calories explains this in great detail. According to Gary:

"Obesity is a disorder of excess fat accumulation. So the question everyone should be asking and always should have been asking is what factors regulate fat accumulation? As it turns out we've known that since the 1960s and it is not controversial. You can find it in endocrinology and biochemistry textbooks, just not in obesity textbooks. Fat accumulation is fundamentally determined by the hormone insulin and our insulin levels go up and down with the quantity and quality of carbohydrates we consume. The more carbs we eat, the more refined they are and the sweeter they are (the more fructose in them, in other words), the more insulin we will ultimately secrete. The higher our insulin levels, the more fat we accumulate."

Exercise cannot and does not solve the problem of fat release from the fat cell. The real key to the fat cell is not exercise. It is the control of hormonal tone and the most important hormone to control is insulin.

As the late Carl Sagan said: "Science as a candle in the dark."

Right or Wrong?

When two physicians give you two different answers to the same question, one of them is right and one of them is wrong.

In these situations, what do you do? Blindly accept the advise of one or the other?

No. You become a gumshoe. You read. You investigate. You become Columbo.

I have truckloads of sympathy for those who are hoodwinked and corralled into taking medications that not only do them no good, but do them harm. My dear mother in law is one of them.

Her doctor put her on statins after she had a heart attack last year. She's fine now and doing well but if the doctor bothered to read a smattering of the scientific literature on cholesterol and women, she would know that statins are useless and cause everyone who takes them liver and neuromuscular harm.

What did Hypocrites say again? Do no what?

It's a shame really. And I feel sympathetic towards the doctors too. But when there is conflicting evidence in a particular area of medicine, don't you think that the doctors have a responsibility to know both sides? So very often they don't. They are entirely clueless to the opposing evidence.

To me this is malpractice. It's certainly wildly irresponsible and disgustingly lazy. This medical malaise is hurting and killing people everyday. Our president wants to know how to fix healthcare. How about insisting that doctors educate themselves on issues that have conflicting evidence?

Sometimes when something breaks, you need to throw the item away. There's just no repairing it. Time for a new one.

Wheaties - the breakfast of champions or just sea monkeys?

Marketing can be awesomely powerful. A good marketer could sell catnip to a dog. We've all been hoodwinked into buying some sort of product at one time or another in our lives that turned out to be a dud or a downright lie. Sea Monkeys comes to mind. I can remember being so disappointed when my sea monkeys, bought with a zillion box tops of Captain Crunch, turned out to be nothing more than brine shrimp i.e., fish food.

It appears that Wheaties, the breakfast of champions, is now spending millions of dollars in an attempt to brainwash people - specifically athletes - into thinking a bowl of sugar is good and will enhance athletic performance.

 

Take a look.

Don't let the hype fool you sportsfans. Cereal grains are nasty stuff. Grains are chock full of antinutrients and when refined for consumption and fully digested, are nothing more than simple sugar.

Sugar is extremely caustic to the human body. It is responsible for a host of inflammatory ills and is linked to damage to the endothelium. 

The endothelium is the thin layer of cells that line the interior surface of blood vessels. Not a good thing to mess with. 

A cup of Wheaties has 24 grams of carbohydrates (essentially sugar). The typical adult has a only a few grams, more or less, of sugar in her total blood volume. (My co-author and friend Dr. Michael Eades says it can be even less than a few grams - as little as one gram even a bit less.) And who eats a mere cup of cereal for breakfast - especially an athlete? When I was a wee lad, I typically ate 2-3 bowls of cereal. (And as you now know, Captain Crunch was my favorite.)

Wheaties cereal is fake food. In fact, I wouldn't call it food at all. I've never seen a Wheaties tree or a cereal bush. All commercially made cereal is among the worst foods one can eat and is especially bad for children. And at five to seven dollars a box, you're paying top dollar to kill yourself. You could buy 3 dozen, muscle-building, bone densifying eggs for that price.

The real breakfast of champions would consist of real foods - meat, eggs, fish,  vegetables and fruit - foods that actually exist in real life.

Be a real champion. Eat real foods. Don't be fooled by nutritional sea-monkeys!

Paradigm Paralysis

Most of us have heard that the definition of insanity is doing something the same way over and over again all the while expecting a different result.

Adolescent obesity - once rare and uncommon is now not only common, but escalating. What we've been recommending for over a decade now to combat this epidemic is to eat a low fat/lower calorie diet and do more exercise. And that is precisely what many experts continue to recommend to this day.

It's not working.

Regardless, the same approach continues to be hammered home by health care professional and famous talk show hosts. The 'less calories in / more calories out' approach has become so ingrained into our societies thought process that alternative solutions are never considered. Far worse, alternative solutions are strongly shunned even when legitimate scientific research shows how effective they are.

The inability to think differently on a subject even in the face of scientific evidence (think Galileo) is commonly referred to as a 'paradigm paralysis.' The longer we remain paralyzed on the issue of adolescent obesity, the longer our children will suffer. Allowing children to needlessly suffer is criminal at best and at worst - I honestly have no word for it.

Obesity is an outcome of excess fat accumulation. What this means is, the obese person's body is storing more fat from the calories they are eating than a non obese person. But why? We know that the hormone needed to store body fat is insulin. In fact, it is one of insulins primary jobs. High carbohydrate diets cause large releases in insulin which sets up the scene for excess body fat storage. Fat does not. This is a fact of science - we don't get to vote.

Children today, thanks to the low fat approach to dieting supported by the ADA, AMA, RDA and other health organizations have shifted caloric intake towards more (a lot more) carbohydrate. Children are taught to fear bacon and eggs and opt instead for a bowl of breakfast cereal with skim milk, toast, a glass of OJ and a banana. This breakfast will spill over 70 times the amount of sugar a child needs to keeps her blood sugar normal. Bear in mind this is just breakfast. And we wonder why our children are becoming obese at an alarming rate?

If we really care about our children - if we really love them - we will snap out of our paralysis and instead embrace what research and basic biochemistry have been screaming at us for years - eat less carbohydrates and engage in exercises that build lean tissue, not burn calories.

Anything else is insanity.