1st set (very slow, intense movements)
Push-up to failure
Wide arm pull-up to failure
Squat (two 35 lb weights) to failure
2nd set
Military push-up to failure
Reverse grip narrow-grip pull-up to failure
Squat (two 35 lb weights) to failure
3rd set
Wide arm push-up
Overhang narrow-grip pull-up to failure
Squat (two 35 lb weight) to failure
Breakfast this morningat 5:00 am:
Two pasture raised eggs seasoned with kelp granules and homemade siracha
A piece of smoked salmon
1 organic apple
sauteed spinach in a small bit of coconut oil
Coffee
I'd like to start off by first apologizing for not having written a post in about a month and a half. I'd had a lot of activity in my life over the last few weeks. Despite all the activity, however, I have kept up with the workout routine. I'm still on about an every 5-7 day schedule at the moment. I feel like I'm continuing to progress with my legs and core getting much stronger than they ever have been before. So I got that going for me...which is nice. What I'm hoping to accomplish with these strength training exercises is a stronger suspension and base for athletic activity (i.e. running). What usually fails me when I've done long runs in the past hasn't been my cardiovascular ability. It has always been my legs, my core, and my joints. I slouch forward, drag my feet and flail my hands in a desperate plea to make it all stop.
What I wanted to talk about today is diet. As a healthcare professional, I fully support the old adage attributed to Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine: "Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food." ALL of good health revolves around a good diet and good nutrition. Exercise is important of course but not from a losing weight perspective. Let me repeat that: diet is key, exercise is a distant, but still extremely important second. The reason is simple: if you want to lose 10 lbs, go out and run 13 marathons back to back. I'll wait. That's the amount of energy stored in 10 lbs of fat. Your brain burns more energy sleeping that you could possible burn during a 30 minute stint on an elliptical. In fact, if you ran on a treadmill for an hour and burned 300 calories, about 100 of those calories are what you would have burned if you had decided to take a nap instead. See the problem?
All of what I'm trying to accomplish with my weight training and running requires optimal nutrition. I want to preface the rest of this post and all my future posts by saying that I take no multivitamins, supplements, steroids, prohormones, performance enhancing drugs (except caffeine...God bless coffee), or herbs. The ONLY supplement I take right now is cod liver oil. What's great about that particular supplement, especially the manufacturer we use, is that it's not really a supplement. It's more an unprocessed food packaged in a capsule. A lot of the time supplement manufacturers, assuming they are even legitimate, process the vitamins prior to packaging them into supplements and that act of processing the vitamins can damage them. Also, what we can get into a tablet might not be all that useful. For example, vitamin A usually comes in the form of beta-carotene. Beta-carotene is a plant derived vitamin A analogue that our body can utilize in very limited quantities and only after it has converted a little bit of it into usable vitamin A. If you want the real stuff, eat some wild caught fish.
The key concept behind good nutrition, I think , is very simple: we have a very limited understanding of the extremely complex roles of each of the essential vitamins and minerals. That we lack an understanding means our man made nutrients and vitamins are inadequate. We must consume a well balanced, nutritious diet. An easy rule of thumb to determine what is nutritious: the closer to how it occurs naturally, the more nutritious it is. For instance, grass fed cows are much more nutritious than grain fed feed lot cows. Organic tomatoes are far more nutrient dense than conventional tomatoes. Wild caught fish is farm more nutritious than farm raised fish. Argue you all you want about whether there truly is a difference but the truth is there is a HUGE difference.
We do know that nature seems to package vitamins and minerals that complement one another. For example, eggs contain small amounts of iodine. However, without selenium (also high in eggs), the iodine it contains is nearly inaccessible. Fish contains very large amounts of vitamin D and vitamin A along with a host of other vitamins and minerals that all work in conjunction with one another for good health. While science has elucidated some basic mineral and vitamin deficiencies (and what happens when you're deficienct, i.e. scurvy), science is only as good as our ability to detect and understand the relationship between the mineral or vitamin and disease. For example, it's quite obvious when people are iodine deficient as they end up developing goiter. That has been established medical fact. Natural sources of iodine historically have included things like natural sea salt, fish, sea vegetables and vegetables grown in iodine rich soil. It turns out that as the US population, especially in the midwest and mountain areas, shifted away from these natural sources of iodine, they developed goiters (the goiter belt). The staples of the American diet (wheat, corn, and soy) have no iodine and in fact have to be enriched with vitamins like riboflavin (wheat) because as a food, they are very nutrient poor. To combat this problem, the US government created iodized salt and recommended that people take in no less then 150 mcg of iodine daily. They found that this bare minimum amount prevented goiter. Later, manufacturers of breads used iodinated flour because flour needs to be oxidized. Traditionally, bakers would leave flour out exposed to air over weeks to oxidize in order form the complex bridges between gluten molecules that are required for bread making. Iodination does this much faster. Inadvertently, iodinating flour allowed people to get enough iodine in their diet until American manufacturers replaced it with the patented potassium bromate. Potassium bromate, a substance banned in Europe, Canada, and CHINA because of its ability to cause cancer in rats and mice is still legal in the United States. In fact, the Chinese recently quarantined a batch of imported snack chips they believe contained potassium bromate. The country of origin: the United States.
It's hard to see what flour this comes from but potassium bromate, again a banned substance, is in it. It's out there. If the Chinese have banned it, maybe we should too. Just saying.
The problem with potassium bromate is that not only is it carcinogenic, but it actually interferes with iodine uptake and utilization by the thyroid. It is thought that since bromine, chlorine, and fluorine are all halides like iodine, they can potentially interfere with iodine biochemistry. Iodine is critical for thyroid hormone production but it also found to be utilized by every tissue in the body. By introducing bromate into the food supply, we went from treating people with iodine to giving them a carcinogenic toxin that interferes with thyroid function. How much iodine is needed? No one truly knows. However, Americans consume very little iodine (about 150-200 mcg/day) whereas the Japanese consume upwards of 10,000 to 50,000 mcg per day because of their sea vegetable and fish rich diet. That a carcinogen like bromate can concentrate in the thyroid and, in addition it's well established that rates of thyroid cancer are rising rapidly, is quite interesting. Dr. Mercola, for example, thinks that because the Japanese consume large amount of iodine from sea vegetables that that may be the reason they have the lowest rates of cancer in the world (among industrialized nations). Iodine (as iodide) is a free radical scavenger in sea vegetables that protects the plant from DNA damaging oxidation. It's reasonable to think that iodine could act the same way in humans.
Some people may take this to mean since we must be iodine deficient, we should find medical sources of iodine (i.e. Lugol's solution), take a dropperful every day to correct iodine deficiency and call the doctor in the morning. My whole point, however, is that that is not required. Choosing more low mercury fish, eating sushi (has nori paper, a sea vegetable), consuming organic vegetables , eating pastured eggs, and avoiding bromated foods (because apparently in America, we have this problem) may be all that is required to correct iodine deficiency. Again, there is iodized salt of course. But iodized salt is a processed, stripped down version of salt with added silica and missing minerals.
Another interesting story involves the fluoridation of drinking water. In America during the early 20th century, there was a crisis of epic proportions. The government identified this problem that they labeled one of the most gravest threats to American national security: tooth decay. American were suffering from rampant tooth decay and gum disease. It was interesting that this was a new problem (not tooth decay per se, but the fact that so many people were affected suddenly). Dr. Weston Price, a world traveling dentist, is famous for studying and photographing Austrailian Aboriginal tribes in the early 1930's. He noted that, amazingly, despite NEVER having had any dental care, the Aborigines had perfect dental health with properly grown wisdom teeth. He noted this fact in tribesman after tribesman who had never left their original hunter-gatherer way of living. He could not find one case of tooth decay, cavities or gum disease among any of them. So astounded, he spent the rest of his life trying to figure out what was going on.
This is a page from Dr. Price's book. These images can be found all over the internet. On the left you have Aborigines who've never been exposed to the westernized diet that was common among the white Austrailians. On the right (except for the top right) however, these Aborigines were placed in reservations and ate westernized food.
In America in the early 20th century, tooth decay as pictured on the right hand side was rampant. To combat this, scientists realized that fluoride in water seemed slow this process down. America fluorinated it's public water in a mass government experiment and teeth brushing became popular. The great dental decay crisis of the 20th century was over.
Except no one except a few people like Weston Price actually asked the right question: Why the HELL did our teeth suddenly start rotting out of heads on such a mass scale? What changed? Dr. Price saw in the Aborigines a clue to the problem in so far as there was something the healthy Aborigines did/did not or ate/did not eat that was different from the unhealthy Aborigines. We do know that around the early 20th century, because of industrialization, sugar became more prominent in our food supply. Up until 1850, sugar was so rare and so valuable because sugar cane was very difficult to process. It used to travel the countryside in small locked boxes under armed guard. With adequate technology and climate, however, the southern US became quite adept at growing and processing sugar on a mass scale. More Americans than ever before could have candy, sweet treats, and this new fizzy drink called soda-pop on the cheap. America became hooked on sugar and highly processed carbohydrates. Today, although the sugar industry still contributes heavily to one of our major exports, the corn industry has taken over a bit. They figured out in the 1970's that exposing glucose isolated from corn to an enzyme called glucose isomerase would create a pool of about 55% fructose to glucose (after some mixing and diluting). Since sugar is 50% glucose, 50% fructose, they had a cheap way to manufacture essentially sugar without having to rely on sugar cane. Sugar cane can only grow in certain parts of the country or world and must still be cut by hand making it expensive and subject to price fluctuations on commodities markets. Nixon wanted a bowl of sweet stuff in every home! Corn can be grown on a massive scale with minimal labor. High fructose corn syrup was born and has since stabilized the industry of sweetness. Unfortunately, because HFCS has made adding sugar to food so incredibly cheap, there was an explosion of sugar containing foods.
Common household staples that contain artificially ADDED HCFS/sugar
All processed breads/hot dog buns/hamburger buns
Soda
Fruit juice (not just the natural fructose fruit contains, but they add more)
Low fat yogurt
Cereal
Pretty much every single snack you can think of (like potato chips).
ANY processed food
etc etc etc.
In fact, of the 600,000 items in a grocery store, 80% of them contain sugar. If it doesn't look like it did when it was in the ground or from the animal it came from, and if I was a betting man, I'd bet my life savings every time that it contained some added sugar.
Why add sugar? Because, sugar is amazing. In fact, of the three major tastes that gives food it's fun (sweet, salt, fat), sugar (sweet) is the only ingredient that activates in humans the same dopamine reward pathways that sex, drugs and rock n' roll do. PET scans of people's brains after taking in a little bit of sugar show their reward pathways lighting up like a Christmas tree. We're addicted to it. And, like addicts, we are very tolerant to it too. In fact, foreigners cannot eat our manufactured breads because they are far too sweet. For a foreigner whose food supply isn't inundated with sugar, they have not built up the same tolerance we have.
In any case, we used fluoride to combat the side effects of a sugar addiction. The question that should have been asked was: what about our food was causing tooth decay? More than likely, it was industrial processing, the stripping of minerals and nutrients and the complete and sudden availability of sugar in our diet that sent a simmering problem into overdrive. Instead of backtracking and doing a proper root-cause analysis, we as a society wanted poor diet and our sugar. The miracle of food industrialization is that for the first time in history, extreme hunger is no longer a real danger. A lot of people profit off of the industrialization of food (sugar manufactures) and so society jumped onto the first thing they could find that seemed to help our tooth decay and let us have our sugar: fluoride.
The side effects of fluoride? No one knows. But, it's not very prevalent in the environment and we drink it constantly because our government says it'll help keep our teeth strong. In fact, most of the fluoride that is put in our drinking water is a by-product of industrial waste. I'm all for recycling but I don't think this is what they meant. Also, you won't have to worry too much about tooth decay. So we also have that going for us...which is nice as well. However, after the discussion about bromine and it's ability to interfere with iodine function in the body, it's reasonable to entertain the idea that fluorine might do the same thing. Granted there is little data to support a direct relationship between fluoride at the concentrations we drink it and disease or disability. Whatever might be going on, we do know one of the most common afflictions that affects adults in the United States is hypothyroidism and the rates of this disease have been on the rise. Many of the cases are auto-immune (Hashimoto's) and supposedly have nothing to do with iodine, fluorine, or bromine. However, our understanding of the pathology and origination of this disease I find to be pretty lacking. No one knows why our immune systems start attacking our thyroids. We do know, however, that there is something making it worse.
As an interesting side note, public water companies put not only fluoride in water but also chlorine. Chlorine, another oxidizing halide, in the form of chloramine is supposed to purify our water and free it from bacterial contaminants. Having clean and disease free drinking water is one of the great advances of modern civilization but only when looked at from the perspective that dirty, disease containing water tends to occur in poor, overcrowded nations. Humans have experimented with running water before in history. Ancient Rome had a complex network of a aqueducts that carried clean water from the outlying mountains into the cities. Everyone drank this public water. It was a miracle to say the least. Unfortunately, it's theorized that the water was contaminated with lead. Although Ancient Romans were well aware of lead poisoning (they preferred clay pipes to lead pipes), their understanding was still basic. There is considerable debate about whether the decline of Roman Empire was due to lead toxicity. While it's credible that people consumed a good deal of lead, the another potential cause could have been that they simply didn't want to have children. After Emperor Augustus passed laws to try to force the aristocracy to have children, he remarked: "And yet, marriages and the rearing of children did not become more frequent, so powerful were the attractions of a childless state" (Tacitus, Annals, III.25).
Sounds a little familiar (cue the ageing United States of America).
Anyway, look up the horror show that is lead toxicity. I'll wait. What is interesting about lead is that its toxicity isn't acute death per se (except maybe in really high doses). Per Wikipedia (always a source of trusted information), "Early symptoms of lead poisoning in adults are commonly nonspecific and include depression, loss of appetite, intermittent abdominal pain, nausea, diarrhea, constipation, and muscle pain." Not that I'm saying we're all being lead poisoned. However, lead pipes were commonly used for home construction in America and are still in homes and buildings. Chloramine, the compound put into water to purify it, can react with lead in pipes freeing it from the pipe into the water. It's interesting, however, that despite all of our science and knowledge, we commit the same grave errors earlier civilizations did. In other words, purify your water.
I used the case of iodine to illustrate the important idea that yes, this mineral is critical to good health but it cannot be artificially obtained. It should be obtained only in well chosen fish, sea salt, sea vegetables, pastured eggs and organic produce in regular quantities. It is a mineral that should be consumed in natural ways with foods that contain other adequate and complementary nutrients. We simply lack a full understanding of how these nutrients act together. The RDA recommendations are only a base amount needed to prevent noticeable disease. It turns out if you eat nutritious food, no multivitamin is required.
Fluoride, however, is a case of science acting on a grand scale on what I view to be a faulty understanding of the truth. Why, after millions of years of being on this planet, did humans suddenly have rotting teeth? In retrospect it seems pretty clear: increased sugar consumption coupled with a lack of adequate nutrition (after all, flour has to be artificially fortified with B vitamins). Despite our advances in knowledge, we still routinely fluorinate water, consume a lot of sugar and brush our teeth.
Dr. Price knew people such as the Aborigines had something to teach humans like us that have lost our connection with the environment. I suspect, however, that even if we learned their lessons, there just isn't that much money in it...
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