Let me start with a request: I need your help getting our new paper open source fee funded. Here’s how this publishing process works: there are legitimate journals and trash journals. Some have higher reach than others (impact factor). If someone wants to be “published,” they can find a journal to put their work in print. Ideally, the peer-review process proceeds something like this: one submits to a journal, the editorial staff accepts or rejects the manuscript for the review process. If selected, it moves, blinded, to a panel of reviewers that are experts in the field Read Full Article →
Starvation Mode
Skip a meal and your body will begin to hold onto fat. We should eat frequently to keep our metabolism up (ugh-I said this all the time). The most important meal of the day is breakfast. I’m not getting all sciency today. I will ramble a bit. We’ll talk at a much higher level. There’s been a lot of reductionism in nutrition and metabolism and it is spreading fast. While the internet has provided unprecedented access to information, it’s also allowed a lot of science babble to infiltrate every subject and diet has to be the gold medal champion. Everyone eats so Read Full Article →
Let The Games Begin
It’s hard to believe that this is only my second post for the year. Where did it go? I’ve not been sitting idle. First, a big thanks to ALL of the people that contributed to the open source fund for the Metabolic Winter Hypothesis paper. Not only did we reach the goal in under a week, but the paper has been a huge success. It broke all download records for the journal and remains their number one downloaded paper. Thank you for helping and thank you for sharing it with so many people.
I am currently working with the Read Full Article →
The Metabolic Winter Hypothesis
The last year left enormous personal progress. It’s been a difficult year in terms of time, but scientifically rewarding. There are many reasons people launch blogs. Some need attention. Others need authority. Then there are others that are bored. Probably the most common are those that just want to make a contribution in an area that find passionate. Health, fitness, and cooking are among the top blogs and there are many, often conflicting, opinions on the subject. While people might “agree to disagree,” there are many opinions that are just wrong.
This blog really started, because Tim Ferriss insisted I put “something” Read Full Article →
Mitochondrial Anarchy: A case of BAT attack
He’s back. Well, actually I never went anywhere, but it’s been a few months since I added to the blog. In the mean time hundreds of pounds were lost by people I worked with directly, an invited commentary was submitted to a journal, and I have performed dozens of calorimetry, blood sugar, and food experiments.
Sometimes it’s necessary to isolate from all the bias and do the boring thinking part. It’s far easier to hype, but at the root of all innovations is a break from status quo. Like trucks drafting on the highway, it’s quite easy to get sucked Read Full Article →
Muscling Your Metabolism (Part 3)
You can’t out-exercise your mouth.
It is a fundamental truth and a brilliant evolutionary strategy. Exercise has many interesting impacts, both positive and negative, but if you’ve been chronically obese, I want to encourage you not to start here. Not only are you putting your heavy, out of shape body into an increased risk of injury, but until you’ve been successful in the one exercise that ALWAYS works, you’ll simply eat your way through any progress.
What is this magical exercise? Isometrically clench your teeth in the presence of fattening foods and excess calories. It’s necessary to control appetite, not “fuel Read Full Article →
Muscling Your Metabolism (Part 2)
The curtain is pulled back and the great OZ is exposed.
If you want to run faster, jump higher and swim farther, then there’s nothing that replaces planned biological stress that trains muscle memory and invokes hypertrophy. That being said the idea of calories in – calories out doesn’t fail because a “calorie is not a calorie,” but rather because the output isn’t really exercise.
You can’t out-exercise your mouth.
While this became fundamentally important to me years ago, it is only in the last year that I have had the ability to dive in and actually test it. Read Full Article →
Muscling Your Metabolism (Part 1)
As I sat on my back porch early one morning in October, 2008, there was no way for me to realize how this one crazy moment would completely change my life. Over the weekend, I attended a meeting in Philadelphia and on the last night proclaimed to a friend that I was about to do the most odd experiment in my life. I wanted to get to the bottom of “metabolism” and “burning calories.” I wanted to understand why it seemed so difficult to lose a couple of pounds and yet I could easily GAIN a couple in a weekend. Read Full Article →
Beauty Sleep
Over the last 6 months, we’ve spent a lot of time on macronutrients and food. I believe (and can prove) the common protein-carbohydrate-fat speak paradigm is broken. These macromolecules are all well understood scientifically, and yet conceptually, real food doesn’t come in simple little packages; macronutrient density/percentage varies from food to food. Even when we attempt to cluster foods together with the these labels, it doesn’t capture the dynamic and interchange of the overriding metabolic rules and microbiome influence.
Generally speaking, the more refined one or more macronutrients in a “foodstuff,” the more unhealthy ingestion becomes. Take natural “sugar” for Read Full Article →
No Guts. No Glory. (Part 2)
As we wind down this journey, I hope you can clearly see the problem with the very simplistic “molecular biology” approach to our biological systems. More than one time during the last two TEDMED events I heard that this approach is dead. The idea that we can use a reductionist attitude to manage one hormone or one macronutrient and have widespread impact has failed repeatedly.
Sugar and oil (not foods, but refined energy) will probably end up being the exception.
We now know that there are a “symphony of reactions” that happen in our body and it is far more Read Full Article →
WIRED March 2013
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