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.