Some quick thoughts

The biochemistry is already there!

Here is a post from Chris Kresser yesterday about fat selection and health.  I am always interested in studies like this, for several reasons.  Naturally, one of them is that it lends itself to supporting my ideas!  But also, I think it is funny how studies like this get all the publicity and notoriety, when we have seen time and time on this blog, and many others, and in the research that this is what should happen.  As always, my personal bias is in the biochemistry and molecular mechanisms that are used by our body, and in these fields we have learned that this is what we should expect when do this kind of experiment on human subjects.  The underlying biochemistry has been developed, and now we put that into practice into these kinds of studies.

Move!

I saw this video of an interview with Ido Portal posted the other week, and it was simply amazing.  Everything about it was inspirational, my favorite quote was "Move, because if you don't, tomorrow you might not be able to"!  So true.  I think I am going to start to implement some of this kind of stuff into my own work.  It doesn't take much to just move around in any way you can imagine, and in my first few goes it has been really fun.  It is also true play, which is something Mark Sisson has talked about frequently, and is tough for many people to implement.  However, all it take is just moving, whatever you can think of, just do!  And always remember that any position you can think of that you can't do is simply some where you could improve.  When you watch the video he makes it all look so easy, but in practice almost everything he does is impossible!  He has a great youtube channel, I would recommend everyone spend some time on it.

Gut Health and Biofilms

Here is a very interesting blog post that deals with a new theory on how pathogenic bacteria might be hiding out in places we don't even know.  I think this is a pretty interesting theory, and has some important applications for everyone.  One of the main things I got out of it was that we might have bacteria that are hiding away in the hard to reach parts of our intestines, and these guys can be brought to life at very inopportune times.

I notice that many times when I eat problematic foods (alright you caught me! Usually this is drinking alcohol), or lots of gluten I will very soon after get sick.  While I used to think this was indication of some sort of gluten intolerance, I now think it is probably due to these biofilms.  When we destroy the villi that make up our intestine we expose these bacteria, and if we also have created a little leaky gut we can quickly get them into circulation and ready to cause havoc!  However, our villi will regrow and cover them back up soon enough, so you can recover from this type of illness rather quickly, which is what have experienced many times. While I don't think we need to go all out on something like this, including some probiotics, maybe some vinegar-y salad dressing every now and then would be helpful to reduce our biofilms.

The Business of Paleo

Here is a cool article I found via Melissa Mcewen's twitter feed.  I feel exactly the same way as this guy, and some of the ideas he presents have made me start to dislike some of favorite bloggers.  I do understand that they do this for a living, so they need to sell products, but sometimes it just goes too far.  What ever happened to just wanting to help people?  There is so much free information out there I can't imagine what they provide in these certifications and pay-to-read programs.  Plus almost all the research they use to make them is mostly free too (why we don't have more free access to scientific literature is beyond me. I wish I was still living on a college campus!).

I do still count myself as a proud member of the ancestral health community, but the direction it is going is definitely worrisome to me.  I will still pay to attend bigger events like AHS because of the community interaction and information sharing, but the rest of this stuff makes us seem like we're just looking to make a buck.  I enjoy doing research and learning new ways to tweak what I do to be a more holistic human being, and gladly share it with anyone who comes across this blog, sadly it seems like this view is in the minority of paleo bloggers these days.  Hopefully it is just a stage...

It's all about asking the right question: What PUFAs do to destroy our health

I recently found this interesting study that takes a mouse model that is genetically predisposed to diabetes, and gives them either a "control" diet, or a a diet high in long chain-monounsaturated fatty acids (LC-MUFAs) (1).  The results they gather are very interesting in their own right, but I'd like to take a different approach to looking at this study than the authors did.

This blog is all about how we can maintain optimal health using evolutionary principles, hence the name.  As you may have noticed in the previous paragraph I put control in quotation marks, and this was for a very specific reason.  The control diet in this experiment was a diet that supplied 7% of all energy in the form of soybean oil, of which over 50% was omega-6.  However, the intervention diet, contained only 3% soybean oil, and 4% was LC-MUFAs, and almost NO omega-6's.  However, for each diet it was only this 7% of energy that supplied by fatty acids.  We can see a breakdown of the fatty acids in both diets in the following table.

If we look at these two fatty acid compositions through an evolutionary perspective, it is hard to argue that a soybean oil diet is a control condition.  So let's flip this study on it's head.  Instead of looking at the results as "how does a high LC-MUFA diet IMPROVE the health of diabetic mice" we will instead ask the question "how does a high PUFA (specifically omega-6's) diet RUIN the health of diabetic mice".  We can use all the same results, we will just look at them a bit differently.  Science is, after all,  all about asking the right question!

Standing Vs. Walking: Which is better for us?

Well I just started a new job a couple of weeks and boy has it kept me busy!  I am hoping to start posting regularly again, but it took a while to try and get into a new a routine with all the newness!

It is just a standard entry level lab job, but one interesting thing about it is the amount of time I end up spending standing.  I work anywhere from 8 to 11 hours a day, and almost all of that is standing.  And I mean standing, not really moving around much at all!  We all know that sitting is very bad for us in many respects, and as a solution we are starting to see more and more standing desk options.  Even more recently I have started to see some walking desk options, by putting a treadmill under a standing desk.  Having recently made a transition from a primarily sitting lifestyle to a standing one with out much walking I'd like to share a few observations I have made over the past few weeks.

• I am getting a lot less sore from workouts now that I am standing more.  And I mean a lot less. In fact, I'll notice I start to tighten up the day or two after a strenuous workout just over a half hour lunch break, or my 20 minute ride into work.  I think standing helps to keep some of the blood flowing through our bodies, and that will really help especially in your legs after heavy squatting.  I think walking would help this even more, and I can't wait for the weather to warm up a bit so I can spend my breaks taking short walks.
• I'm insatiably hungry these days.  Standing really does burn a significant, at least for me, amount of calories, and to compensate my body is hungry almost all the time!  If someone was interested in dieting, standing a lot could be a convenient way to help burn a few extra calories, if you can manage to keep the hunger cravings away, unlike myself. 
• I may be a fairly young buck at 22, but I can tell sitting has already left some lasting problems in my musculature.  I am unnaturally tight in certain parts of my hip that I can tell are from sitting.  Standing is helping to make a me aware of these problem areas, and hopefully I can start tackling them and getting my mobility going again before sitting takes over my life again.  Or maybe just standing more will help these muscles to losen on their own, just through more use.
• Standing is hard work!  This goes hand in hand with the hungry point, but I thought I would mention it separately.  I remember in one episode of the mobility wod he talks about how the little ledge at every bar ever is there so that you have something to put your leg up on and take yourself out of extension.  This, he says, makes it easier to stand for a longer period of time, and for a bar allows you to stay and drink more.  However, for those of us standing all day this is a life saver.  I could not stand that long without getting out of extension regularly.

An argument against sitting for most experts is usually rooted in evolution, and anthropology.  Our ancestors rarely sat, and we can see this in the low amount of sitting traditional cultures do.  They then proceed to tell us that standing is a better option.  Wait a second, I certainly don't see traditional cultures sitting often, but I don't see them just standing around either.  I think the human default must be that of constant movement, and extremely varied movement.  Think of all the complex movements you would have to do out gathering, or even working in a field,  all the bending, crawling, kneeling, and twisting you do out hunting.  We aren't meant to sit, and the negative effects of it are becoming more and more apparent, however, I don't think just substituting in standing is the most optimal thing to do.

This realization that movement is our default and we need to just plain move more is some what ironic for me personally.  A couple of months ago I was thinking about these treadmill desks I was hearing about and thinking about how stupid they seemed.  I was even considering writing a post about how I thought the standing options was just as good, and you shouldn't waste your time with the walking crap.  But after some forced self experimentation I can see that I was dead wrong, and constant movement throughout the day is the best option.  So, whether it is taking walks on your breaks, using the stairs, or anything else you can think of just try to move a little more throughout your day! 

The Life Bridge

I just finished The Life Bridge by a trio of health professionals Paul Shulick, Thomas Newmark, and Richard Sarnat.  The book was about fermentation, and how important it is for human health.  As I am sure many people who read this blog know, fermented foods are a part of almost every traditional culture on the planet, and are a very important type of food to consume for overall health.

I thought the book was very well written, however some parts were a bit rambling.  I would say the main point of the book is how fermented food can act a bridge between inorganic vitamins and minerals, to organic living organisms.  His main example throughout the book selenium, which is a very important to human health.  He talks about one study that shows the antioxidant effect of a "selenium yeast" is much greater than that a traditional selenium supplement.  When I looked further into the study I had trouble finding what his exact citation.  I did find this study that examines the differences between various types of selenium and glutathione enriched yeasts, and is by the author he mentions.  Although I can only get the abstract, I think what comes across as the main point is that these enriched yeasts can allow us to get more benefit from our supplements, than just taking inorganic vitamin and mineral salts of chelates.

I am sure many of you are wondering "what exactly is a selenium yeast?".  Well it appears these are just yeasts (usually just simple brewer's/baker's yeast) that are grown in selenium rich environment.  You can also enrich yeasts with many other vitamins and minerals (like the glutathione ones), and the authors say this is becoming a big player in supplement manufacturing as a whole.  At first I found it odd that the selenium rich environment was usually just the selenium salts that they were saying were not as good as these selenium yeasts, and then the life bridge concept really started to sink in.

I would compare the life bridge idea to that of nitrogen fixing in plants.  All life needs nitrogen for many basic functions.  The atmosphere on earth is mainly nitrogen gas, so you would think this wouldn't be a problem.  However, that nitrogen is unusable to many organisms, it would be great if humans could simple absorb this nitrogen through our lungs or skin and use it.  We rely on plants and fungi that have the ability to take in nitrogen and "fix" it into the organic compounds needed by life.  This is exactly what probiotics do, and why they are a life bridge.  They are able to absorb inorganic minerals and viatmins and turn them into usable organic compounds that we can easily utilize.

Many of us have heard of the term "bioavailability", or the ability of our body to absorb and use a compound, and the authors show us that probiotics are bioavailability machines!  They can turn many low bioavailable supplements into extremely bioavailable ones, and all you have to do is combine them and wait a while!

The book does a great job of convincing anyone who doesn't believe in the merit of probiotics just how important they are.  And for those of us who already know that we need to consume them, it does a good job in laying out the science for just why they are so important, and the mechanisms they use to work for us.  I would highly recommend the book, as it a very quick read, yet still quite detailed!