(D)efense

Vitamin D is a well known nutrient, however, I think few people really understand the significance of this important vitamin.  To  begin with, vitamin D should hardly be classified as a vitamin at all, since it is really hormone that helps to signal our bodies calcium status (1).  However vitamin D (VD) has been implicated in a range of processes including obesity, renal disease, cardiovascular disease, male fertility and even sex hormone production (2,3).  With all these different actions of VD it is tough to know where to start, as there is so much research on how VD affects so much of our lives.  I do think these many actions are very interesting, and well deserving of a post in their own right, but I would like to focus this post on VD’s interactions with the immune system, as that is a topic consistently on my mind these days.  To do that we will first go over a quick look at VD metabolism, and then get into its effects on immunity, and finish up with some thoughts about our own VD status.

Vitamin D Metabolism

As humans there are two main ways we can get VD: through sun exposure and supplementation.  We will go over the optimal VD levels at the end of the post, but first lets see how sunlight affects our VD status.

Absence, and future posts!

Well, I know it has been a long time since I have done significant posting, I have been pretty busy since Thanksgiving with projects, tests, and just general wrapping up of the semester.  However, I completed the last final of my undergraduate career this morning, so regular posting will continue soon.  Some topics to look forward to in the coming weeks include:

• Vitamin D
• Antioxidants
• Fructose
• More on cooking
• Clock genes

And many more!  As always, if you have a good idea for a post, or would like to learn more about a topic send me an email or write it in the comments!  One of the hardest parts is coming up with good topics to write about, so suggestions are always welcome.

The Signal and the Noise: What does it mean for science?

I just finished reading Nate Silver's excellent book The Signal and the Noise.  This book is all about statistics, and how often misguided we are when hear statistics get thrown out for everything from weather predictions, to earthquakes, even baseball.  It is very well written and engaging, he has quite the sense of humor, and gives funny descriptions of the people he met to interview for the book (to the reader at least, I doubt some of these scientists appreciated how he depicted them!).

In the book he talks about his own personal journey.  He began as an economist for a big accounting firm, but developed a baseball sabermetric program that he sold to another company and struck it big.  From there he turned to political forecasting, and has done quite well, he correctly predicted the results of the presidential election in all 50 states!  They guy is what I would call a "genius"  so the book is a must read.

However, this blog is about science, and what can a scientist take away from this book?  Well, I think there is quite a bit for us, especially since statistics are the basis of our profession (statistically significant anyone?).

The main thing I would like to discuss here is this paper by John P Ioannidis.  Nate talks about this in his book, and the title of it is "Why most published research findings are false".  Woah, that's quite the mouthful for any scientist to swallow.  How does he come to these conclusions?  Well he uses a lot of statistics that, to be honest with you, mostly went over my head.  I was able to understand most of the article when the numbers were absent and he used words, though!  What I got out of the article was that most of our published research findings are suffering from some of the most basic problems that the scientific method is supposed to sort out.

The first, and obviously most occurring problem, is bias.  Ioannidis uses math to show that as bias increases the probability of a research finding being actually true goes down.  I feel like bias is definitely as issue in a lot of journal articles, and we see it all the time.  I think many people will remember an article published not long ago that said that eggs were just as deadly as cigarettes?  Well, it turned out these guys had connections to the cholesterol drug market, obviously they are going to find that the high cholesterol eggs are very bad for you.

This is just one type of bias though.  Another type would be purposely designing an experiment to get a result you want.  This can be done in many ways, by how you ask the question, to the statistical methods you use to present your data.  Ioannidis talks about many studies that will use statistics to develop results that have a p<.05 (the standard in most scientific literature) when they previously did not meet that criteria.  This is obviously poor science, if you modify your data so it looks how you want.

Another way we introduce error into our scientific studies is by saying that just because a difference is small, but statistically significant, it is a meaningful finding.  I struggled with this principle myself when I was writing the How to build muscle post.  There were many studies that showed certain associations, but they were so very small.  However, the study said it had a statistically significant finding, so I assumed it was true and used it as a source to back my claim.  Significant or not, are these small gains enough to say something is important enough to publish a paper about it?  Maybe we just need to be more selective about what gets published these days.

The most funny problem that Ioannidis points out is the competition between groups that can lead to exaggerated findings.  If one group doing similar research to yours publishes a finding,  one that is "statistically significant, and you can make the opposite finding in a "statistically significant" way, you should publish your finding immediately!  Why?  Well, mainly its just to be a dick, and say you're wrong!  This great for you and your career, and can help grab headlines for your field, but is very damaging to science as a whole, where consensus needs to be found on topics.  If you have opposite finding you need to work together to find and modify your experiments so that you can reach a consensus answer that benefits science.

Nate talks about this consensus view at length, and recommends that "Bayesian" thinking is the solution to this problem.  He throws out the situation where you are in a world where all your predictions are depicted on a sandwich board, and when you meet someone with a differing prediction, you must either make a bet with them about who is right, or come to a consensus.  This type of bayesian thinking is the core of Nate's book, and is quite the insight for those of who might have differing views, especially us scientists who seem to be rarely trained in this bayesian thinking.

All in all, I think both Nate's book and Ioannidis' paper are very good reads, I would recommend both of them to anyone.  I think the main thing we get out of both of these is that we need to be better at critically analyze the data.  We need to be sure we are finding signals, and not just noise.

Competition Culture: What have we done?

Wow, what a sad,sad story coming out of Kansas City this weekend.  My thoughts and prayers go out to anyone affected by this tragedy.

An event like this makes me call into question our competitive culture.  Now, obviously this young guy must have had some problems.  And I'm sure stuff like this happens to people all the time and it doesn't get as much notice because they are in the position this kid is.  But, my question would be, do you think this would have happened to this kid if he had not been a pro football player?

Most of these players a essentially just kids, from the time they reach about sophomore year in high school they begin to come under intense scrutiny.  They are immediately thrust into the spotlight, and many of them continue to stay there through college ball, and into the pros.

Cam Newton is 23, and is almost exactly one year older than I am.  He regularly has articles published about him on a national level that call into question every aspect of his character.  Can you imagine being that young and having have those things read about you?  I can't, in fact I'm right up there with the other people saying they hate him most of the time.  I'm 22, and I spend most of my time wondering why my funny facebook status didn't get more likes, not thinking about whether or not all of my basic values are right or not.

Nathan Scheelhaase (for those of you who don't know who this is, he is/was the quarterback for the University of Illinois. Go Illini!)  is 22, in fact, he is about 7 months younger than I am.  He regularly is referred to as talentless on certain sites around the web.  What?  Can you imagine what that would be like?  I get stressed out when I have two exams in one week, I can't imagine how would feel if I could also pick one of a number of sites to read why random people think I have no worth.

The pressure most of these kids are under by choosing to be stars in this culture of competition that we have is just unreal.  It is not just the injuries these athletes are sustaining that will have lifelong side effects, it the emotional and phychological damage that comes from this culture as well.

I am reminded of Peter Gray's talk from AHS this year in times like these.  He talked about how in most traditional societies around the world there is very little competition.  One thing that really stuck with me was when he said that if you give kids a soccer ball in these societies they don't play a competitive game with it, they play something like seeing how long they can collectively keep it up in the air.

This competition culture isn't just present in athletics though.  It can be seen in almost any industry in America these days.  Who can get promoted faster, who can publish more papers, who can earn more money.  All the time we are constantly bombarded with competition, and it just doesn't seem natural to me.

Stress also plays a big role in this.  When you are in an intense competition like this all the time you are under quite a bit of stress.  Not only are these kids under stress during actual games that millions of people watch, but their actions throughout their lives are more stressful than ours. I think play can be a great way to reduce stress, and everyone should have multiple different stress reduction strategies they can turn to when things start to build up.

I think we could all benefit from some extra play in our lives.  Even if that play comes in the form of a competitive, taking the competition element out if it can make it that much more enjoyable.  For instance, one of my roommates and I enjoy playing racquetball, or course someone ends up winning, but we don't go out there with the intention of winning or losing, we just play a couple games so we have something more to do than just hit the ball for 45 minutes.

When you look at the multitude of factors that are contributing to our current health epidemics, both physical health and mental health, I think it is hard to say that our competitive culture is not helping to cause it.  Through the stress this competition causes we are slowly broken down, and stress reduction strategies need to be implemented to help us reclaim our health.

How to Build Muscle

Alright guys, I’ll admit it.  I’m vain.  I would like to be bigger.  Maybe not Arnold big, but I would like to add a few more pounds to my 5’ 10” frame.  However, many people struggle with the herculean task of adding muscle mass, and for many there doesn’t seem to be any solution.  Any one who has looked into the topic knows that there are a few basics you need to follow: Lift heavy weights often, and EAT!  These two things will get people on the right track, and they should be able to add a considerable amount of muscle, especially if they are new to weight training. 

Yet, these two suggestions are somewhat vague, especially the eating part.  Some people will tell you just to eat everything in sight, and gain as much weight as possible then after the weight is put on you can look at cutting down on the fat you have gained.  Who really wants to get fat like that though? 

Another question people have about the eating part is how much protein should they eat?  While getting in enough energy to grow through healthy fats and whole food carbohydrate sources such as potatoes is certainly needed, protein remains kind of an anomaly in the diet for many.  If we follow what the body builders have been preaching for half a century or more we would think that the way to put on weight is to consume massive amounts of protein 8 times a day or more!  Another question mark is when to consume this protein, especially around a workout.  Well the science in this particular area has come a long a way in the past decade or so, and since a friend asked me many of these questions and more a week ago, I thought I should dig into the research to see if my own thoughts on the subject were valid, or if I needed to revise some of them.

The Central Problem of Gaining Muscle: Net Protein Balance

Ummm, that was a hoax, right?

Well people are talking, so I'll talk back.  Have your heard about these Raspberry ketones that Dr. Oz is making famous?  Someone in my 400 level nutrition class asked about these today, and I had already looked into them this week after first hearing about them on Monday or Tuesday.

They are supposedly a "magical" fat burner, and Dr. Oz is apparently pretty high on them.  Also, stores can't keep these bad boys in stock!  But is there really any science to back this holy grail of fat burning up?

No.

Brain evolution: Was it all cooking?

I have seen this new article about how metabolism affected brain evolution emerge in several places this week (1).  I think it is, for the most part, a great article, and would recommend it to any one with interest in this area.  Anything with math usually gets my attention, and this article uses math to support its hypothesis in an easy to understand way.  However, I am not sure that I can fully support the conclusions the authors, and many others, have come to about how their data relates to cooking.

If we take a closer look at the article we can see that the main point being made is that there is simply not enough time in a day to take in enough energy to support both a large body and a large brain.  They make the point that the human brain accounts for only 2% of body weight, but consumes 20% of our energy.  Another interesting fact they have is that for every billion neurons we have we need to consume about 6kcal to fuel them.  Using this data they hypothesize that if we were to eat the same diet as our great ape relatives, we would have to spend over 9 hours every day eating to get enough energy to support our brains and body.  Do any of you spend  9 hours eating?  I didn't think so.

This eating constraint is the real result of the paper, and not the ways we overcame it.  It is in the discussion they discuss reasons why we, as early humans, were able to overcome the constraint and develop our large brains.  To quote the authors:

"such a metabolic limitation was overcome in the human lineage by the advent of cooking food, which greatly increases the caloric yield of the diet, as a result of the greater ease of chewing, digestion, and absorption of foods"

However, I think a lot of other adaptations were taking place in early humans that allowed us to develop our brains. I have written before about how important fat is a brain fuel, and when we switched from the herbivorous diet of our great ape relatives into one that included more animal products we also started consuming more fat.  Let's review our basic nutrition facts quick: Carbohydrate=4 kcal/g Fat=9 kcal/g.  For every one hour we spend eating fat we gain over twice the amount of energy.

I think our reliance on fat as a primary source of energy was probably more important than our adoption of cooking.  This doesn't mean we can throw out cooking, I do believe that cooking played an important role in making us distinctly human.  I just don't think that it was the sole, or even largest, factor in our transformation like these authors seem too.  Again, I think I think this is a great article, I just wanted to provide some food for thought for those of you who have read this article or have seen it popping up around the web!

Cholesterol Esters: The Real "Bad" Cholesterol?

Ah cholesterol, the much vilified nutrient!  If we listen to most of the traditional nutrition and health information out there we are forced to think that cholesterol is extremely bad for us and should be avoided at all costs.  However, as many of you may know already, cholesterol is essential for human life.  It is a major component of all of our cellular membranes and is the precursor to many hormones we need (1).

Also frequently mentioned are the different types of cholesterol, the so-called “bad” cholesterol, LDL, and the “good” cholesterol HDL.  However, calling these two transport molecules cholesterol is really a misnomer, as they are complexes containing many different types of proteins, fatty acids, and only a portion of it is actual cholesterol.  These two molecules have different functions in our body, and can come in a variety of sizes.  However, labeling them “good” and “bad” cholesterol is incorrect and misleading.

So is there actually a “bad” form of cholesterol?  I have already said that cholesterol is essential for life, but there is a type of cholesterol that does appear to be bad for us.  This type of cholesterol is cholesterol esters, which is just a cholesterol molecule attached (esterified) to a fatty acid. Not all cholesterol esters are equal though, ones that are attached to polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) appear to be the most dangerous.

Cultivating a Passive Mind

Well now that the Ketosis articles are over I am going to delve into some other topics that have been interesting me lately.  Some of these next few posts won't have as much science in them, and will be more personal musing on health than anything else.  As the blog continues to grow I am hoping I can develop a nice mix of some of the more technical science of health and nutrition, and some lighter things that are more subjective.  I think they both have their place as science is always changing and growing and some things might not have concrete answers yet.  Please feel free to leave some comments about what you would like to hear about! And now on to today's topic...

Matt Metzgar has talked several times about the importance of “darkness time” for health.  He has also noted how he feels much better on days when he gets more darkness time than others.

We also don’t have to look too far to find the benefits of meditative practices that also help to cultivate health and wellbeing (1, 2, 3).

There is a lot of evidence for the benefits of things like music and story telling can have a positive effect on health as well (4, 5).  These are the kind of recreational activities that our ancestors participated in (6). 

Sleep is also one of the unquestionable best things we can do for health, and the evidence for that can be seen from many sources as well (7, 8, 9).

Why do I bring all these up?  Well I think they all have one common thread that might be at the root of their benefit to health.  They all are ways of shutting down our minds and allowing it to rest for a bit.  Now, some of these things obviously have a mental component to them, we can’t play an instrument or tell a story without using our brains to facilitate the action, but they allow us to have a “passive mind”.

Ketosis VII: Practical recommendations

Well, here we are at our final Ketosis post!  It has been a long ride for all of us, and I hope you have learned as much as I have while researching the topic.

We have seen a lot of benefits of ketosis from helping lower triglycerides to helping with certain neurological conditions.  Now while all of these things sound great, how do we appropriately approach ketosis?  While many of us may want to try and be in ketosis at all times after seeing these benefits, and that it is a normal, physiologic process, I do think there are some reasons to not be in ketosis all the time, but I will cover those in a separate, later post, since I think they relate better to a different topic I have been thinking about lately.

So we know we have three main ways to get into ketosis: fasting, low-grade exercise, and high fat diets.  I think an appropriate ketosis-style diet is one that will combine all three of these into a cyclic approach, that way we make sure to leave ketosis for a little bit every now and then.  Also, as you will remember from my cornerstones of health posts I believe a system of HOW you eat it is very important to overall health, and we will also incorporate this system into our ketogenic protocol.

Ketosis VI: Therapeutic Roles

We have covered most of the hardcore science that I wanted to review when looking at ketosis and ketogenesis.   We have covered most of the relevant biochemistry in terms of how are ketone bodies formed and how they are regulated.  That is all well and good, but I am sure many of you are just wondering how ketosis can benefit you, right?  Well, this article is meant to show you some of the benefits for ketosis. 

Ketogenic diets have been used as therapeutic diets for some conditions for over a century, and while it isn’t used as much anymore, it probably should be.  This article will mainly go over how it can help out those in a disease state; however, I think the mechanisms through which ketones act in the diseases show us some of the power of these energy molecules.  You many not have one of these diseases, but seeing how much they can help with certain conditions certainly makes you think twice about them.

Ketosis Part V: Medium-Chain Triglycerides

We have covered a lot of ground so far in looking over the literature on ketosis and ketogenesis.  We have seen what ketone bodies our body actually uses, and how they are regulated on many levels.

We already know that a high-fat diet is a great way to induce ketogenesis.  However a question many of you may be asking is “Do all fats have the same ketogenic potential?”  Well, the answer to that is no, some fats are better at inducing ketogenesis than others.  The most ketogenic fats we have are the medium-chain fats.

We consume many different kinds of fats, and all these fats vary in two different ways, chain length and saturation.  Saturation refers to the number of double bonds a fatty acid chain has, with no double bonds being a saturated fat, and one or more double bonds being an unsaturated fat.  The medium-chain fatty acids we will talk about here are all saturated fatty acids.  They are called medium-chain because they have between 6 and 12 carbons in their chain (1).  Here are a couple of diagrams of some of these medium-chain fats.

Caproic/Hexanoic Acid

Ketosis IV: Cellular Regulation

As we have seen already the control of ketosis is controlled through a variety of mechanisms in our bodies. And, most importantly, many of these mechanisms are intricately tied to our bodies’ own energy sensing pathways. We have seen ketosis regulation at a variety of levels throughout our bodies.  It can be controlled through conscious action, by eating a high-fat diet or fasting.  It can be controlled throughout our internal environment by hormones and other signaling molecules like insulin and glucagon.  And now we will go down a bit farther even, and look at how ketosis is controlled at the cellular level.  Again this one will be a technical article, so as always if you have questions post them to comments!

Ketosis Part III: Hormonal and Enzymatic Regulation

Alright, and we’re back!  So our story so far has covered what ketone bodies are and how they are formed, and some of the ways we can turn our bodies into ketone body creating machines.   This article will look further at some ways the creation of ketone bodies is regulated.  As I did with the last article I will put out the “lots of science” disclaimer on this article.  This one will be more technical than the last one was, it is just the nature of the beast when you are talking about some of these complex biochemical pathways.

I know that all the weird letters and numbers that represent proteins in our body don’t really mean much to most people, but remember they are really just designations for various receptors our body uses to recognize each specific chemical in our body.  It is important to remember that things in our body usually can’t just go in and out cells and tissues as they please.  Few things in our body just happen.  They are all controlled by various receptors and proteins that help to move them.  So, while I will be presenting the actual biochemistry here, I hope I can bring each section home at the end and give everyone a take home message that will be meaningful.

Ketosis Part II: Regulation

Now that we have a good idea of what ketone bodies are, and how they start to get formed and where I think it is time to loot at the regulation of the process.  I think what has been really interesting to me in researching this topic is that I expected to find some sort of “master switch” for ketosis.  What I mean by that is I figured that something would happen that would turn on ketosis, and as such you are either in ketosis or out of ketosis.  However, as we saw in the last article everyone produces small amounts of ketones at rest, and ketosis is physiologic process that just happens when the substrates are available and are not being used for other processes. 

There are two main types of regulators for ketogenesis, and while they may seem very different to some people, I think they are rather similar.  It all depends on what energy our body is using, and in what amounts.  Ketogenesis can be controlled either through physiologic processes or through enzymatic processes.  We will start with the physiologic ways that ketosis is controlled, and then go to the enzymatic/hormonal ways, since those are probably a bit more complicated.

When we talk about physiologic processes that induce ketosis we are talking about what is going on in our body to make it start naturally producing ketone bodies.  There are three main ways this happens, and a fourth little trick people use to jump start the process (any guesses now what that is?).  The three ways are: starvation/fasting, prolonged exercise, and a low carb/high fat diet.  Let’s take a look at each of these in turn.

Ketosis Part I

Everyone has heard of it, some of you may love it, some of you may hate it.  While most people know the general facts about ketosis, I have been hearing a lot about it lately, and it seems like every time you talk to someone different about it they have a different opinion on it.  Some people think it is the ideal state for our bodies to be in, while some think of it like the plague, and something to be avoided at all costs. Well, I am going to try and clear up some of the confusion on the matter.  This won’t be an easy, or small task, so bear with me as I try and go through all the facts to make sure I get everything right.   As a general game plan I think a good place to start will be what are ketone bodies, how are they made, how are they transported and what tissues can use them.  Then we can move into their metabolism, uses, and long term ketosis.  Other topics will come up along the way, but that is what the information I hope to synthesize here for you.  In order to transmit all of this information we will have to get fairly technical, and I will have some pretty complicated figures presented, but hopefully I can pull out the main points of them for everyone.  Well, let’s get started.

Cornerstone #3: Eating to satiety

The first two cornerstones have focused on what to eat and when to eat.  Now we focus on the obvious next question: How much to eat?  As I previously talked about our body has an incredible ability to regulate its energy intake all by itself.  Without conscience effort of what, and when to eat, humans should be able to regulate their energy balance on a completely unconscious level.  This process is regulated in many ways throughout the body, but I think one of the key ways to maintain this balance is to always eat to satiety, or fullness.

Benefits of Intermittent Fasting

We are going to take a quick break from our regularly scheduled programming because I just stumbled upon this new study from FASEB. The study is titled "Timed high-fat diet resets circadian metabolism and prevents obesity".  The wording "Timed high-fat diets"  is kind of confusing, but if you read the paper what they did was an intermittent fasting protocol.  Rats were separated into one of 4 different groups: an ad libitum low-fat diet (AL-LF), an ad libitum high-fat diet (AL-HF), a restricted feeding low-fat diet (RF-LF), or finally a restricted feeding high-fat diet (RF-HF).  The restricted feeding group was only allowed to eat for 4 hours/day, while the ad lib groups could eat whenever they want.

The results were pretty striking.  The RF-HF mice consumed the same amount of calories as the AL-LF mice, but had a 12% reduction in body weight compared to them.  Also, the RF-HF mice also had lower cholesterol levels, higher insulin sensitivity, and lower inflammatory markers than all the other study groups.  The RF-HF mice also showed signs of improved lipid oxidation, showing that the fat they consumed ended up being burned for energy, and not stored.  Not to mention that the HF diet was based on soybean oil and these are mice that are predisposed to become obese on a high-fat diet.  Finally you might think that these researchers were starving these mice on the RF protocols, but the RF-HF mice had lower ghrelin, indicating a higher degree of satiety.

A lot of people think that the benefits of intermittent fasting come from reducing calorie intake due to the small eating window.  However, this study shows that even if you eat the same amount of food, and pretty crappy food at that, eating in an IF way can help you improve your health.  I have found that I naturally tend to eat in a restricted feeding type way, with most of my eating happening a 6 to 8 hour window just naturally.  I just thought this was a pretty interesting study and showed some of the very powerful benefits of IF protocols for health.

Cornerstone #2: Eating when Hungry

Our bodies are an incredible thing.  They are able to control so many different processes and chemical levels all inside a contained system with no external support.  This type of internal regulation is known as homeostasis, and allows us to do things like always keep a constant temperature, ensure our blood pressure doesn’t get too high, and even keep a proper pH balance within the body.  The body even has its own homeostatic controls for energy balance, and uses these to help control how much energy goes in and out.  Now, I assume most of you are asking yourself that if the body can internally control things like blood pressure and energy balance, why are there so many people with hypertension and obesity?  Well, these homeostatic controls can break down, especially in the perfect storm of the Standard American Diet (SAD). 

This internal control of energy is nice and all, but how can that help us?  Well, I think it leads us to my 2^nd cornerstone for health: Eating only when hungry.  Do you think our hunter-gatherer ancestors stopped at noon to eat lunch just because it was lunch time?  No way!  They ate when they needed to.  Obviously this eating strategy is starting to look like it’s on to something from an evolutionary perspective, but lets take a look at what the current science says about this.

Cornerstone #1: Eating a whole food diet

While doing some research for another post I came across an interesting article by Spreadbury about how the type of carbohydrate differs in an ancestral diet compared to a western diet.  The article, “Comparison with ancestral diets suggests dense acellular carbohydrates promote an inflammatory microbiota, and may be the primary dietary cause of leptin resistance and obesity.” was just published the other month, and is available for free online.

The article is really great and is well worth the read.  He starts off by explaining the discord between much of the data for macronutrient ratios and obesity.  While both high fat and high carbohydrate diets have been implicated in the development of obesity in western society, these diets result in very healthy people when consumed in a “traditional” culture.  Since these diets only promote obesity in a western culture, there must be some other factor that makes these diets cause obesity, rather than the carb/fat ratios themselves.

Brain Fuels

If you ask many people what the primary fuel for your brain is they will most likely tell you that it is glucose.  In fact many sources used to say that the brain could ONLY use glucose as a fuel.  However, it has been known for some time that ketones are more efficient fuel source for our brains.  In fact this article says that ketogenic diets have been used as a treatment for epilepsy since the 1920’s!  And now, an even more efficient fuel is being talked about: Lactate.  Peter from Hyperlipid has a good write up about a paper that talks about the brain using lactate, and why he thinks it is such a good fuel.

This is all well and good, I am all for feeding my brain the most efficient fuels.  If we evolved primarily to support such big and “expensive” (energy consumption-wise) brains this would seem a very important thing to do to maintain good overall health.  However, after reading all this I am left wondering: How am I supposed to get all this lactate to feed my brain?  I can’t eat lactate. Also, with all these fuels for our brain, is there an optimal ratio of fuels?  Let’s take a look.

Trying new things

I think that one of the most rewarding parts of switching over to an ancestral lifestyle is that you are always willing to try new things, and things that once bothered you don’t anymore.  I am sure there is a more scientific explanation for this, but it is just something I have noticed.

When I was younger I HATED trying new foods.  If it wasn’t something I was comfortable with, I didn’t touch it.  In fact, my family was known to create chants to help me finish off certain foods at the dinner table (Peas and cream corn come to mind).  However, after living an ancestral lifestyle for the better part of 3 years now I have no problems trying new foods.  I went from being the least likely person to try new foods, to the most welcoming of the new experiences. 

I think this also holds true with other things in life.  Those who follow an ancestral lifestyle are just more willing to do say yes to new things.  We are more likely to go with the flow.  Other lifestyles are rigidly structured by meal times, work times, travel times, and all other routines.  But, when you adopt the ancestral lifestyle you throw a lot of that out the window and just start doing!  You also make more room for play, and have structured stress reduction techniques.  Is there a link between stress reduction and a willingness to try new things?  Most likely, especially because the kind of stress we are most accustomed to is the worrying, anxious feeling we get in an out of the ordinary situation.

I think this all ties together through play and fun.  Trying new things is exhilarating and gives you a rush and satisfied feeling.  This also is pretty similar to Mark Sisson’s recent posts on IE. 

So, with that let’s all go out and try something new today!

A human need for fiber?

Well after attending AHS 2012 the other week I came home with more questions then I could have imagined going into it.  All of the presentations were fantastic, however the safe starches panel seems to be the most talked about.  This was very interesting, as it seemed like the panelists covered almost the entire spectrum of a carbohydrate intake continuum.  Another point that was brought up was the need for dietary fiber, and, being somewhat unsure about this topic, I decided to dig a little further into it.

Hygiene Hypothesis and you

I was involved in an interesting conversation at work the other day about how some of co-workers manage to get out of the bathroom germ free. Some of the ideas ranged from waiting until someone else came in, the classic foot flush, and a delicate dance where you open the door with a paper towel, wedge it open with your foot, then proceed to throw the paper towel into the garbage. Now, while I do wash my hands after using public bathrooms, I've never heard of people getting so worked up over germs, and it brought to mind the idea of the Hygiene hypothesis, so I thought this would be a good time to take a look at it.

Is the Mitochondria the answer?

I have read Nick Lane's Power, Sex, Suicide. I have read the FIRKO mouse paper where they gave FIRKO mice the gold thioglucose treatment that is supposed to cause obesity. And now we come to the next paper by these same researchers, studying the mitochondrial gene expression of their FIRKO mice.

Eating Pork: Safe or Not?

Here is a recent post by Paul over at Perfect Health Diet:

Pork: Did Leviticus 11:7 Have It Right?

While not a bad article, it did make me consider my pork, and even alcohol, consumption, but I did have some real problems with it.