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!

Old age, blindness, and light quality

Aging is a process that is as universal as a process can be.  Everything ages, all animals, plants, even planets and the universe as an entity age.  It is something we cannot avoid, despite the many searches for a fountain of youth.  And as we age, we may or may not become afflicted with the many complications that accompany getting old.  Our joints start to get stiffer, our muscles get a little weaker, and our memories might get a little worse.  However, these conditions aren’t all or none, and there are many things we can do during our lives to help decrease the amount of function we lose in old age.  These include eating a healthy diet, exercising regularly, and managing stress. 

One complication of aging I’d like to discuss today is our eyesight.  This one thing I am sure most people would like hang on to for as long as possible, since, as humans, we rely on our eyesight more than any of our other senses.  We have all seen eyesight that deteriorates in old age, many people start to need glasses when they never did before, or it might be getting harder and harder to see street signs while we are out driving.

This type of loss of sight is known as age-related macular degeneration (AMD), and is a phenomenon that plagues millions of people every year.  However, the exact causes and the development of this disease aren’t clearly known, so finding treatments and prevention plans for it is very difficult.  But, like many diseases of civilization, this one has inflammation as a root cause.

How AMD is an inflammatory condition 

There are many intersecting lines of evidence that help to show the inflammatory nature of AMD.  The first we will discuss is parainflammtion caused by ROS production. Since certain parts of our retinas are comprised of a large amount of neural cell types along with photoreceptors the energy needs of this tissue is very high (1).  This will create a high metabolism in these tissues, which can easily start to create ROS when energy is in constant excess.  As we have seen before, these ROS can then damage the retinal tissues, and cause inflammation.  Additionally, these ROS can be developed by a process called photooxidation, which the energy from the light itself excites the oxygen species, turning them into ROS. The presence of ROS causes new blood vessel growth to occur, and this can result in choroidal neovascularization (CNV), which is another form of AMD.

Next, certain components of our immune systems “complement system” have been implicated in AMD.  By far the most well known complement is CRP, or C-Reactive protein, which is a common biomarker for inflammation.  Another complement implicated in AMD is complement factor H (CFH).  An interaction between a certain genetic variant of CFH and CRP has been shown to be a main cause of AMD in over 50% of cases (1).  However, this interaction has been shown to be most dangerous at CRP levels >3mg/L.

There are several other additional lines of evidence that support the hypothesis that AMD is inflammatory in nature.  Most of these are based on anti-inflammatory treatments improving AMD in patients, or other diseases known to be inflammatory in nature increasing the risk of AMD.

One twin study found that smoking, which is known to drastically increase inflammation and the risk for a host of diseases, was highly correlated with AMD.  In fact, the risk factor was 32% greater in smokers than in non-smokers (2). 

The same study also looked at the effects of omega-3 consumption on AMD risk.  The omega-3 DHA is found in high concentrations in many of the photoreceptor layers of the human retina.  It is also an anti-inflammatory, which can help to reduce AMD risk.  In the twin study, they found a preventive effect of 22% by those who consumed the most omega-3s compared to those who consumed the least.  This effect was even amplified by those who consumed low omega-6s in their diet as well (2).

Since ROS production is on of the primary drivers of the inflammation implicated in AMD, supplementation with various anti-oxidants has been shown to help AMD (3).  Other lifestyle modifications such as quitting smoking, and losing weight if overweight or obese have been shown to lower the risk for AMD.

The effect of light on AMD

As many of us know, the light that comprises the visible spectrum in composed of many different wavelengths, with each color being its own distinct wavelength. Additionally, the visible spectrum leads into the infrared spectrum at its low energy end, and into the violets and ultraviolets at its high-energy end.  However, not all wavelengths of light are created equal to our photoreceptors.  It turns out that the blues, violets, and ultraviolets are actually damaging to our photoreceptors (4).  In fact, our eyes have developed a way to deal with this as we age, and that is to turn our lens slightly yellow in order to block out some of the blue light.  This study modeled the effects of adding certain filters to a model of the retina, and measuring the ROS production, beginning at age 70.  As we can see on the far right of the graph, when no filter is used we have fairly high rate of ROS production.  However, when a yellow filter is added to block out blue light, we get a decrease in ROS production.  An even greater reduction in ROS production is seen when we filter out UV light, as seen by the white diamonds that are virtually on the x-axis in the bottom right corner.

Another interesting experiment into the effects of light used photobiomodulation, or providing specific wavelengths of light to elicit certain signaling effects, on mice (5). In this they exposed mice to a “damaging light”, which, interestingly, was just a regular 18W fluorescent light. They then treated this light damage with three different near-IR light treatments, one that was only done before the damaging light, one during, and one after.  They then looked at the number of immune cells in various parts of the eye, and you can see what an effect the damaging light (the LD treatment) had on the mice.

I think with these studies on the effects of light on our eyes we can see just how important it is to limit our blue light exposure.  This is a very common type of light emitted from our computer screens, phones, TVs, and almost all other electronics.  You can pick up some nifty yellow tinted glasses to help block out the light, and as geeky as they might seem now, being able to see when you’re 70 or 80 is probably worth it!  Otherwise, just trying to limit the amount of time we are exposed to these sources that emit mainly this type of light is something we should all try to do.  You can also download F.lux for your computer screen, but I haven’t yet found a good app for my phone for it (I have an android, it looks like you can jailbreak iPhones to get it on there).

Another important thing to note is just how important crubing inflammation and supporting our immune systems are to all facets of health.  By doing this and keeping our energy levels in check we can help ourselves age more gracefully, and avoid many of the complications of our current industrialized way of life.

(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.