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New Paper Submitted, Accepted, and Corrected!

By admin On November 14, 2016 · 35 Comments

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 (meaning they are anonymous to the author). The comments and criticisms are returned or the paper is rejected outright. If the former, after corrections are made, the journal moves forward with publication. The process allows great ideas to be vetted, but there are times when valid papers aren’t moved forward due to politics, even in respected journals. It happens and some editors can introduce bias, but on a whole I would say that this is the exception, and not the rule. Unfortunately, there are people gaming the system with misleading titles, abstracts, and conclusions and this leads to confusion and obfuscation for those that don’t have their pulse on a particular field.

Once all of those hurdles are cleared, the article publishes, and hopefully it informs and influences other researchers in the field to dig further. New ideas come, spread, and sometimes are replaced when new evidence presents. Journal articles can fall into a number of categories, but loosely speaking, some are reviews of a particular subject, while others present new evidence (data) that lead to reshape how we think about the world. In the latter category, some “new data” are simply reanalyzing old data aggregated from many studies. Sometimes the data are first time observations. Often, people are confused by science “always changing” and in fact, that is what differentiates science from dogma.

One scientist you’ll learn about in depth in Our Broken Plate is Justus von Liebig, arguably the father of organic chemistry and the scientist behind the chemistry laboratory practicum for students of science. He wrote,

A theoretical view in natural science is never absolutely true, it is only true for the period which it prevails; it is the nearest and most exact expression of the knowledge and the observations of that period.

~ Justus von Liebig

Ideally, one of the most important elements of science is repeatability. When new data are presented, other scientists should duplicate. One problem we face today is that “discovery” (first observation) gets more prestige than “confirmation” (repeatability). This also has a related impact on science education in that it’s impossible to review a field that has been growing. For over a century, the same four years of standard university (or eight, total, adding graduate education) is still the path to degrees and hasn’t significantly expanded in length from how people were educated a century ago, when there was arguably a lot less to know. One potential problem with a time-limited approach is that many things need to be summarized and condensed to fit within the curriculum. There’s simply not time to go back and read hundreds of books. In fact, often a modern day graduate textbook has 2-3 sentences that attempt to cover decades of discovery.

What may unintentionally occur is a massive game of “telephone” (Chinese whispers) during which the message gets distilled and distorted to the point of becoming almost meaningless. Compounding this problem are the various bloggers, media, and other self-anointed experts that have a lot of understanding about some of the latest discoveries and studies, but don’t have the breadth or depth of knowledge to cover the animal models, plausible mechanisms, metabolic ward studies, or older observation studies. Without the context, it’s very easy to create an echo chamber and perpetuate misinformation. My last blog on “starvation mode” is an example. Of course our bodies, replete with adipose, doesn’t source energy from muscle, organs, or brain. It uses our fat storage organ. Why isn’t this as obvious in the light of the many hibernating animals that survive weeks or months with little or no food?

With these massive swings in how we organize and discuss certain subjects, I think we’ve reached a crescendo for protein, carbohydrates, fat, and metabolism. I was confused, frustrated, and confident all at the same time. That’s something many of you can probably relate to as these contradictions are repeated so often. Our Metabolic Winter Hypothesis and the new paper are both review articles. They were invited reviews (thanks to my esteemed collaborators) and the result of looking back over two centuries to retrace the path of how we arrived at this current “whisper.”

Journals are in a bit of a financial conundrum right now as they built a business model on selling subscriptions with most academic institutions providing access to all their professors, researchers, and students, and the rest of us get a paywall. It can be $20-40 for a single article, which is completely ridiculous. On the other hand, that’s laid the groundwork for open access journals to thrive. The authors essentially fund their own articles and we all get access to them for free; there’s no paywall. In the best of all worlds, this is how ALL journals should operate. If there is anything that internet has solidified, it’s the value of disruptive innovators and that would be enhanced in an open access scientific forum. The obvious problem is that this can be taken to the extreme when articles become “pay to play” and articles aren’t vetted properly. We need watchdogs like Jeffrey Beall, who weed out the predatory hacks from the legitimate journals.

Help Me Get The Word Out

There are a growing number of the traditional subscription journals that are offering authors the opportunity to pay an open access fee after the review process is complete and the article is accepted. The journal we used for our first paper and this new review article is one of those publishers. I want this paper to be free, like our previous one, and need your help with the $3,200 open access fee. I funded all the work and did the heavy lifting on the research side and I’d like your help to get the message out. Our last paper broke all download records for the journal and the publisher. This one is MUCH better! It’s twice as long, there are six figures/tables, but only one more reference (104 vs. 103). It takes the Food Triangle into healthspan and longevity and it turns diet and exercise upside down. It delves into a new way of looking at metabolism that is consistent with all diets – there’s no sugar/oil prejudice. I’m likely going to piss off both sides of the debate.

The press proofs were finalized on Friday, November 11th, and I am excited for this to hit the street, but don’t have a publish date yet. It’s the culmination of nearly six years of questioning what I knew to be unquestionable. Because one of my collaborators is a program director at NIH, we also circulated the draft to some of the top minds in metabolic research and they, too, thought it was a very disruptive twist that appears to explain many contradictions in diet and exercise. Please take a moment and donate here:

Thank you for your continued support and thanks to everyone that’s supported with subscription donations and my kickstarter project. It’s been amazing to have the opportunity to work on this project. Even after Our Broken Plate ships, there is much more to information for us to weed through and we are already working on our next paper that will center on disrupting diabetes. As well, there is a possibility that research funds will become available so that new clinical trials might be put in place to sift, sort, and screen the many contradictions. Perhaps we might establish a new language surrounding metabolism and food that avoids them altogether.

Reflections

I want to take some time to recount a little about how we got to this point as so many new readers have signed up in the last couple of years and may not have read all of the material. As well, perhaps this will help gain a little input on where we need to go.

First, but it may come as no surprise, I’m not a professional blogger. I’m an amateur. Writing one or two blogs a year for the last couple of years isn’t going to earn me enough “clicks” to matter. I don’t really sell anything here, so for those new to this site, let me give a quick recount of why it’s here and what it’s all about. In 2008, I had been struggling with my weight for nearly two decades. I didn’t know it then, but type 2 diabetes, and potentially cardiovascular disease, was knocking on life’s door. I was sick and tired of being sick and tired. I decided to put everything – all my focus – into correcting the situation. It was a full-time commitment, a no work, no play, no distractions lifestyle intervention. Death isn’t a problem easy to recover from and I didn’t want to die. I saw it all around me, eventually even seeing it with close family members. I didn’t know it at that time, but I was literally eating myself to an early death.

As part of my life reboot, a chance October 2008 report on Michael Phelps’ domination at that year’s Olympics completely stopped me in my tracks. How could he possibly eat in day approximately what I was eating in a week and be ripped and fit? It doesn’t matter if the number was 12,000, 8,000, or 6,000 Cal, it was a big number and I was eating well under 2000 Cal/day, working out 6 days a week (Body for Life – upper/HIIT cardio/lower/repeat), and a strict 6-meal a day schedule (one palm-sized serving “protein” and one fist-sized “carb” four times a day, plus two times, add a serving of vegetables). My friend, Joe Polish, had even been the guy behind Bill Phillips before-and-after contest. Bill had interviewed me on stage in 2007 about the partial success I made. Anywhere you read that I was “just taking ice-baths,” stop immediately, and discount that source. I was working hard with diet and exercise to make a difference and my success was always very short lived.

Fast forward to 2009…I had finally reached my goal of ~180 lbs (started at 240 and started documenting at 230 – see 4 Hour Body for details). I ran into Tim Ferriss (he had been at the 2007 event with Joe Polish) at the opening session of Singularity and summer International Space University, both hosted at NASA/Ames in California. He was shocked by my progress and asked me if I’d be willing to be part of his book as he too had done a lot of exploratory work on cold and wanted to tell my story in an upcoming book. I said, “sure,” at that time I had no intention on being involved in weight loss beyond my own struggles. My business partner in Zero-G Corporation, Peter Diamandis, marched me all over Mountain View, CA and had me repeat my crazy cold stress story. Ultimately, the TEDMED2010 talk happend, 4HB shipped, and the rest is history.

Unfortunately, it didn’t end there. Tim strongly urged me to have something on the web when his book hit the press to “gather the contact info of people interested – just in case – and hence, this blog is here. At the time, I didn’t care that much about (nor did I have any intention to work in) diet, health, or weight loss. How I went from weightless to weight loss still shocks me. I didn’t do this as “that guy” that works day and night just to be internet famous. The early community (both on comments and direct email) was really a lot of fun. Back then, people said crazy stuff in the media, like cold slows down the metabolism. Dr. Stacey Ingraham is mistaken, but there are many that teach and think like her at that time. I’m sure there are those out there. Again, if you’re new, this isn’t the freeze-your-ass-off diet, the ice diet, or the eat anything and lose weight with “brown fat” diet. That’s all nonsense. There were people that challenged my views of metabolism. Some were absolutely right and I was absolutely wrong. I had much more time to blog and we had some great discussions that are captured here in comments. If you read from the beginning, you’ll see how my ideas transform.

At some point, there’s it’s senseless to study metabolic output if one doesn’t understand input. So that naturally lead to my exploration to the Calorie and diet. The Calorie is often maligned. misused, and misunderstood, but I can say categorically that the dietary Calorie IS NOT the problem. It’s an accounting issue. I am just shocked at how pervasive this Chinese whisper is that we don’t know how fat is accumulated on our bodies or what happens to metabolism in “starvation” has become. It’s awful and there are huge gaps in even top academicians. Many have allowed the mechanistic milieu and socially normal eating to cloud judgment. In my review of papers for both the book and this article, I can point to paragraph after paragraph of distilled and distorted information in textbooks, journal articles, and, of course, blogs, magazines, and newspapers that can easily be demonstrated as false.

It’s not Magic or Rocket Science…

It’s Food. Nobody understands it all. We all have bias and so many of us post and repeat things that we’ve accepted and not verified. Yes, I once said the same thing, and told the same stories about protein, carbohydrates, fat, and metabolism. If one builds a mid-life crisis metabolic lab next to their kitchen, spends nearly 70 days with no food, and reads 50-60 19th century reports, it gets real pretty quick. I’ve had dietitians, physicians, surgeons, researchers, women, men, and celebrities as clients and there haven’t been any exceptions. I didn’t intend on becoming a diet guru, but it did allow me to continue this investigation. Why am I so confident? It’s because their results don’t differ substantially from metabolic experiments in the 1950s, early 20th, late 19th, or even late 18th centuries.

How could the Calorie be so wrong? These historic results match my modern day results and weight loss to me appears to be consistent across the board? It seems that if there were a big error, someone would have caught it by now. How can there be this much confusion over a century later? I believe it’s a result of widespread misinterpreted summary to the point absurdity. My unique vantage point may have been accidentally stumbling into the quagmire from the perspective of mild cold stress combined with dietary (calorie) restriction. The vast majority of research studies on weight loss are focused on the noise – losing trivial amounts of weight over extended time periods – and they miss the metabolic adaptations that we all carry to use our storage organ, fat, as fuel in times of real scarcity. We cut through that noise with this paper and it should come as no surprise that the contradictions can be explained, but most importantly, that your questions (and challenging my partially correct stories) were all part of solving this puzzle. We need to discuss food in a different context and that’s as true for macronutrients as it is for social and ideological perspectives. There is a huge bias looming over academia, medicine, and the fitness industry concerning when, how, why and what we eat.

Penn’s NYT Bestselling book, Presto, is doing great and, of course, there are the expected many that seem to think he’s done something unhealthy, when clearly his physicians and his results disprove that opinion. There were an estimated 196,000 bariatric surgeries in the U.S. in 2015 at the cost of ~$5B. The net-net of these procedures is that people rapidly lose weight by having their intestinal tract surgically rearranged to interfere with swallowing. That seems radical and crazy to me, whereas teaching people not to swallow, or at least to swallow something different to achieve the same weight loss rate, seems far more sane. Somehow it’s hard to imagine people dying from too many salads or sweet potatoes. Surgery doesn’t deal with the root cause of obesity: our broken social relationship with food.

Nonetheless, I am proud him and of the many other people that have stepped up to the plate…and actually made a move! These are real lifestyle transformations, not crazy hacks. As of November 12th, 2016, 425 people have lost 20,444 lbs. I have nearly 150 to add to that number, perhaps some of them have reported in as well. If you HAVEN’T reported to Nichelle, please email your information to her so we can include it in next week’s tally. As you might imagine, I have been a bit deluged by requests and so many have reached out for my help. I’d like to gauge interest in how many of you might want help in a serious lifestyle transformation. My policy up to this point is that no one can sign up with me unless they know someone who has succeeded. On a few occasions, I have made exceptions…but I regret it every time. I am considering something different and have assembled an amazing team to potentially offer this to a wider audience. It will still be extremely limited as I’d prefer people to finish and not just start. I’d rather backload success than frontload failure like we’ve come to expect from other weight loss programs.

Instead, our program is centered on transforming how you think, talk, and socially react to food. Here’s your best chance to let me know and to potentially slide around my knowing someone barrier. Once we get this launched, future clients will all come from existing successful ones, but I created this mailing list form with basic information needed to gauge interest. Please be sure to confirm your subscription via the email sent to you.

I’m not going to share this list, nor will I be using it outside of this one request. I don’t know how long this list will stay open or even if we’ll will move forward with the project, but at least it will give everyone an opportunity to toss your name in the hat. If we launch this, we’ll be creating a fun, inspiring community centered on a new paradigm of food and social eating.

Our Broken Plate

I’m behind, but the road ahead is a clear path. It’s a HUGE hurdle behind me to have this paper published. I have two more chapters to write in the book, but there is no doubt this was a much larger task than I had anticipated, especially alone.

FundAnything seems to have bit the dust. If you backed that platform, I have the email address used there and will find a way to contact everyone when the book is ready to ship. Don’t panic. I apologize for underestimating just how much time this would take, but progress is good and it WILL be finished. I will be updating kickstarter backers as well. As soon as I get the main writing behind me and the cleanup begins, I may launch a dedicated blog for Our Broken Plate and move this discussion over there.

Thank you again for your support, encouragement, ideas, and patience! It’s been a long journey, but I’m not too far away from the finish line. If you want to subscribe and donate monthly and pass on one starbucks every 30 days, then consider this my tip jar and it will be put to good academic use for books, lab supplies, and research.

As always, I am grateful to all of the regular donors, emails, FaceBook Friends, and commenters for allowing me to pursue this passionately for the last six years. It has been such an unexpected adventure and there’s much more work to finish.

Thanks!

Ray

Starvation Mode

By admin On October 27, 2015 · 98 Comments

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 we all must be experts.

I hear of quantum physics and love from people that don’t know the schrodinger equation or a microcanonical ensemble exist. Their “frequencies resonate.” It’s widespread co-opting of science terminology to make things sound more well thought out and factual than they really are. In science, we celebrate the unknown. We don’t know how to define the emotional and it’s handled in the soft sciences. They see trends, but science looks for fundamental rules that govern how things work. 2 + 2 = 4 is a mathematical relationship and as amazing as may sound, it’s true whether here or on voyager spacecraft that’s left our solar system. If you have two marbles and your travel mate has 2 and put them in a bowl there will be 4. We have other scales and mathematical tricks that can make this equation an inequality, but in normal counting, it’s true and can be verified.

In 1996 Carl Sagan wrote a fantastic book, Demon-Haunted World. In it he warned (foreshadowed) a reality of the future:

” I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…

The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.”

He went on to say,

“We’ve arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.”

While that sounds all a bit cynical, I really am using it to give us a nudge. We need to be skeptical, but sifting and sorting through the blogs, diet books, media, and social discussions is a daunting task for even the best educated. There’s a saying that a specialist knows more and more about less and less until they know everything about nothing. Conversely, a generalist knows less and less about more and more until they know nothing about everything. We all fit this to a degree in some aspect of our lives. Clearly the internet and media echo chamber has spoken on starvation mode and it’s doom and gloom if you don’t eat.

A Closer Look

Here is one example quote I found with a Google search that is quite interesting:

“Quite simply, your body goes into ‘starvation mode’. This mechanism, which is thought to have evolved as a defence against starvation, means the body becomes super efficient at making the most of the calories it does get from food and drink. The main way it does this is to protect its fat stores and instead use lean tissue or muscle to provide it with some of the calories it needs to keep functioning. This directly leads to a loss of muscle, which in turn lowers metabolic rate so that the body needs fewer calories to keep ticking over and weight loss slows down. Of course, this is the perfect solution if you’re in a famine situation. But if you’re trying to lose weight, it’s going to do little to help you shift those unwanted pounds.”

Let’s talk about basics. Fat is a storage organ. It is there for times of famine. The body constantly taps into this storage organ when we enter the fasted state (~4-6 hours after a meal). So here is what they are saying, in a nutshell – if you don’t eat the body holds onto the back up reserves. That’s backwards thinking. Further, it’s posited that the body will instead use lean tissue (from muscle/organs) and accelerate that loss – all to preserve our fat storage organ.

Reflect on that for a minute.

Why would the body hold onto this precious fat storage and instead cannibalize our vital organs and muscle tissue, because of food scarcity? How might that helped the evolutionary process? Seems to me that those who digested their heart or leg muscles before using fat reserves when there wasn’t any food wouldn’t have jumped into the gene pool with all the vigor as those of us that actually lived on our storage organ. Don’t you think? I’m imagining the number of people it took to build the pyramid stopping 3-6 times a day for a quick pick-me-up. Don’t you think they tossed them some water and said, “keep chiseling! pull the rope” and perhaps they ate some bread etc… a little later?

Now, the body absolutely has some adaptive changes to accommodate food reduction. There are metabolic shifts and changes in how we use fuel. I learned last year that even after 30 days of a VLCD followed by a medically supervised 14 distilled water fast I wasn’t deficient in anything. I don’t want to cloud the discussion with ketosis, fat adaption, etc… as it’s all somewhat tangential to the main point. Let’s for a minute put aside the debate over metabolism havoc. Let’s acknowledge we can’t explain everything and yet our bodies managed to get you right here staring at a screen from a single cell without help and perhaps in spite of what we swallowed. It’s remarkable.

When in the fasted state we use reserves. That’s why they are there. Fat and glycogen are long and short term (respectively) storage organs. You’ll be fine on the 4 hour flight without peanuts.

Magic Meals

Last year when I was coming home from the self-experiment, my daughter and I decided to stop in Vegas and visit with Penn & Teller. I have known them for over 20 years and we hung out after the show. I’ll leave the bigger story for Penn to tell in his spring 2016 book, but he called me later and asked for help. Maybe you’ve seen the news by now, but essentially he lost a little over 100 lbs, most of it in a three month period we worked together. He’s off 8 BP meds and in fact his medication is down to almost nothing now. You can listen to us discuss this on his Penn’s Sunday School podcast here or download it on iTunes.

He’s looking and feeling great. While the media likes to toss around “1000 kcal/day” diet (or gastric bypass), he has no idea how many calories were consumed. I don’t either and as I will be explaining there are much better ways to think about food energy conservation that are not only predictable, but also repeatable. Then there is the echo chamber – read this article and imagine that this otherwise well-educated physician makes all these WRONG diagnoses based on information in People Magazine. What physician or scientist uses People Magazine as a primary source and then does an analysis? This is how the echo chamber works. I’d challenge his notion that nutrients are somehow deficient because he was at a caloric deficit. I wonder how Dr Ayoob would explain the successful results of this 382 day water fast (and btw, he didn’t gain it back)?

Speaking of Fast…

Today happens to be the 5 year anniversary of my TEDMED talk that slipped me into this entire world of food. I had no idea this was coming and if it hadn’t been for Tim Ferriss urging, I wouldn’t even have a website. I didn’t do this for a business. It was an intellectual curiosity. My friend Tim Jenison had an amazing project I helped on back in 2009 that became the inspiration for my research. If you haven’t seen Tim’s Vermeer, it is a REALLY great documentary.

I was staying with him and beside the bed on a shelf were stacks of history and art books about Vermeer. Tim, as you will see, was obsessed with how this artist did these incredible paintings. Vermeer captured on canvas that which the eye can’t see. The movie tells the rest of the story and I have my tiny appearance with our 2am decision to start building walls for the room – look for the forklifts scene. After The 4 Hour Body came out there was a little backlash about the veracity of my work. Keep in mind, I did the cold stress work, because I was desperate to lose weight. It wasn’t a research project, but I did jot down notes as it’s habits for me. That was the seed that went into 4HB and you can read the rest elsewhere on this blog.

What puzzled me was still the Calorie and the apparent contradictions. I wasn’t buying the Good/Bad or even the “high fat/low carb” (or any variation thereof) dogma. I wanted to understand it. Well, I did as my budget would allow to dig into this project like Tim. Having a midlife crisis calorimeter in a lab adjacent to the kitchen is a great way to test anything you want about food. I learned a lot and especially that most of the older studies were easy to reproduce. I don’t think they are wrong, but I believe a lot of things we repeat, that I repeated, aren’t correct. You all know very well by now that I don’t think “protein, carbohydrate, or fat” serve us anymore as food groups/categories. We need a new paradigm.

Today is day 16 of a medically supervised 21 day water fast for my book. I feel fine and perfectly normal (as normal as I get). Hanging out with new and old friends here, reviewing 5 years of research and writing. I may have to go out to 24 days depending on how some tests turn out at the end (more in future blog or book). As I mentioned, I wasn’t deficient in anything last time at day 14 and I performed a midpoint blood panel (~$1500 each) to see how well that tracks my last fast. Of course I will do a blood panel at the end.

This time I am focused on “muscle loss” particularly urinary nitrogen. As we learned in Passing the Protein (part 1, part 2), urea is the metabolite of amino acid metabolism and so one can track loss by collecting 24 hour urine samples. We need the indispensable amino acids (~9 of 20 depending how one counts them – not 2 +2), the rest we make. It’s been 2 weeks of drinking water and peeing in a jug. This will supplement the dexa results from last year and give a more complete picture. If all else fails, I guess it’s training for the reality show, Naked and Afraid.

Take a look at my results above and what you’ll see, like last year, my metabolism is fine. It’s not crashed, but scaled with my mass and my fat burn is through the roof. Yes, as evolved, our body actually uses our fat STORAGE organ in times of no food. That’s not a difficult concept, but wow, is there a lot of confusion. I want to try to nudge this. I’d like to change the dialog.

Cool not Cold

I don’t want to sound opportunistic, but you may have read about the recent tragic death in a Las Vegas cryotherapy spa. It is a horrible loss to her family and they have my condolences. This is probably an isolated incident, but nonetheless it’s an opportunity for me to reiterate my position. As anyone that follows this blog for a while knows, I am an advocate of mild cold stress not extreme. One does not need to go to extremes to get the benefits of cold therapy. If you are new to the blog, use the tags at the side and you’ll be able to navigate to the many posts that discuss this. Mild cold stress begins in water temperatures below 80F (26C) and air temperatures below 60F (15.5C). There is no reason to go below 60F(15.5C) water or 32F (0C) air. Generally speaking one can get all the benefit they need from just a 10 degrees or so on the thermostat or to carry layers and use as needed.

Ideal temperatures are 75F (24C) water and 55F (13C) air. These are the most comfortable and are likely plenty to get the beneficial impacts. Remember the “reverse ski layering” strategy – take them along and wear as needed instead of leaving the house bundled and losing layers throughout the day. A quick walk from the office parking lot to the front door won’t likely result in hypothermia. It’s fall in the northern hemisphere and we are naturally adapting to the cooler temperatures. The photoperiod is also getting shorter. These are all biological cues that signal winter is coming (wow has that phrase changed meaning in 5 years). As we explain in the Metabolic Winter Hypothesis, the combination of sleep, dietary restriction and mild cold stress may have a synergistic effect with activation of the sirtuin genes – those that we have shown in animal models to increase healthspan/lifespan. Contrast showers can aid in this adaptation process and it’s helpful in sleep.

As well my close friend, Wim Hof, has been on many blogs lately and I don’t want this to sound contradictory to what Wim teaches. His main message is what our body is capable of doing with training and that he’s not a unique superhuman (I’m still impressed). In fact, when I visited him a few years ago in Amsterdam, he noticed one day that he wore a jacket on our walks to the grocery store and I had a t-shirt and gloves. In his warm laugh and great accent he said, “look at that. The iceman has a coat and you are in a t-shirt.” We opened the windows that evening and slept amazing. He was grateful for reminding him that he’d been locked up in the apartment. Wim is pushing science to go past the handed down dogma on extremes and human limits and he’s doing amazing work with the autonomic immune system. I don’t want this to be misunderstood.

Kickstarter- Our Broken Plate

In the next week I will be launching a kickstarter campaign for my book, Our Broken Plate (update: Campaign went live on November 1st and closes on December 13th). I’ve had a lot of requests over the years to write one and so it is now a “done deal.” I’ve had some discussions with publishers, but feel that I can be more true to my message if I at least write it first as a cohesive story. Honestly, they all want me to write a diet book and that may be way more successful, but I don’t want to write a diet book. My goal was to examine how our social relationship with food changed over the last two centuries. It’s been fascinating to pile my own shelves full of old books and especially be emerged in the the 19th century when all the fun happens. By 1920s we are on a trajectory to where we find ourselves today. It’s surprising that many scientists predicted, and even warned about this situation.

There are no villains. It’s not an evil government conspiracy as many of the recent books have put forth. There’s no greedy corporate America that is just trying to kill us all with genetically modified food. We don’t discuss big pharma or big farms. It’s not a “fat vs carb” or eat meat/don’t eat meat story. It’s not a textbook as we’ve already made food way too complicated. The book is more of a history-mystery with my self-experiments juxtaposed on some of the great science on metabolism and nutrition. I’m going to stretch it a bit in places with new explanations for old data. I find it ironic that many of the players of the late 19th century would be perfectly comfortable, and to some extent know more, in a discussion today about metabolism then as it plays out in the blogosphere. We’ve forgotten so much and this valuable data is lying fallow on university bookshelves and used book stores around the world. I’ve collected some of the best and for me holding that 170-200 year old book in my hands and reading it is incredible. I don’t think we are all broken as is so widely claimed. To me it’s our relationship with food that’s broken.

I plan to finish the book in the coming months and hope to have it published by April 2016. We’ll have a crowd-sourced cover design and many other activities. I’ve learned so much from the people here and on the various Facebook groups. The questions have been fantastic. Having worked now with over 100 people one on one has been a real eye opener. If there are any subjects that you’d like to see covered (the book is pretty far along at this point) please comment below. I may not be following up as closely as normal as there’s lots of testing to do and I have my kickstarter campaign staring me in the face.

I appreciate your support and thank you for hanging in here even when there were extended times I had nothing to say. Perhaps this research project will make up for it.

In addition to the kickstarter (there are a couple of high end rewards, but most are books) I’d like to immediately raise $5,000 to help defer the costs of the testing and travel associated with this test and as a jump start to the writing project. I appreciate your support! You can use this link or the one above near the goal donation meter.

As always I am grateful to all of the regular donors, emails, FaceBook friends, and commenters for allowing me to pursue this passionately for the last 6 years. It’s been such an unexpected adventure and there’s much more work to get done. I’m going to get back to my water now.

Mitochondrial Anarchy: A case of BAT attack

By admin On November 6, 2013 · 132 Comments

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 into the popular dogma to avoid slamming into the guardrails.

My mentor in innovation, aviation rebel Burt Rutan, says you have to have “confidence in nonsense” to innovate. That doesn’t mean that every nonsensical idea represents brilliance, but there is a certain break with the masses that occurs with each innovation. In addition to crazy ideas (we can find a lot of those out there), one must measure carefully and that is the boring part, but I LOVE it. I also like old books, because they give one a much more grounded view of how our current ideas evolved and sometimes it’s easier to see the forks in the road that lead to the current (obviously wrong) idea about eating by stepping back and working your way through it. If you love history and musty, stained books, then it’s really a joy to do it.

History not reflected, repeats.

There’s been a lot of ground covered in the nearly three years I have been blogging and it’s exciting just how much more research is coming out every year. So many people are doing great work. I have much more on metabolism and the macronutrient shuffle, but I’d like to cover some new work that published over the last year and a few papers have been meaning to cover for some time.

Since it’s been a while since I last posted (yikes!) or you are visiting for the first time, let’s digest a few bits before going into the main topic. What I want you to know at the highest level is food, or fuel, is THE reason people fight obesity and many chronic diseases. Further, I think macronutrient labels (protein, carbohydrate and fat) are meaningless when discussing food, eating schemes or meals. Exercise is incredibly beneficial with increasing performance and many health biomarkers, but it’s not the fastest way to lose body fat and can significantly impede weight loss.

Your metabolism isn’t broken or low – in fact it scales (gets larger), as does lean mass, with weight. Hitting the gym to put on lean mass to burn calories and ramp the metabolism isn’t necessarily the solution. If lean mass was the only thing needed to lose weight then why do bodybuilders or football players ever get fat? They certainly both have more lean mass than I or Aunt ethel will ever have. You know what?

You can’t out exercise your mouth.

It’s food. It is what they eat not how they burn it. I didn’t say don’t go to the gym nor am I attacking bodybuilding or football, but I want to disconnect those activities from the notion that people are overweight because they aren’t “active” enough or don’t have enough “lean mass” to melt the fat away. It simply isn’t true and for the most part, exercise nowhere near as an effective way to lose weight as diet – especially for people with 50+ lbs to lose. I am not implying that there aren’t ways to boost metabolism, but what your diet has a much larger effect on the outcome.

For the last year, I had the luxury of measuring many situations and conditions in a home metabolic lab. There is a seemingly unending list of myths I once believed, things that are repeated as fact in everyday conversation, which are not consistent with what I see in the lab or the peer reviewed literature. It’s humbling and frustrating all at the same time. Some of you see this and many more don’t, but anyone that carefully measures would come to similar conclusions. Part of the problem is the monolithic, group-think that seems to infect the fitness/diet community. Certainly the medical community isn’t immune. I was as guilty as the next.

I’ve heard it said that a generalist is one that knows less and less about more and more until they know nothing about everything and a specialist is one that that knows more and more about less and less until they know everything about nothing. We have a lot of generalists and specialists parading dogma despite unprecedented understanding about how our body works. I’ve reflected a bit on just how this happens and perhaps we can use it as a sub theme for today’s post.

In the northern hemisphere it is fall, and this is now ABSOLUTELY one of my favorite times of the year. This is biologically a period running up to winter’s conservation. It’s a time when our metabolic system becomes stressed and will rebound with vigor in the spring. This is analogous to muscle hypertrophy in response to the biological stress of lifting a weight. The overall endocrine system is not stressed by excessive nutrition; it’s stressed by caloric restriction and there is 70 years of data to support this hypothesis.

Every organism tested, from yeast to mammals, lives longer (40-50%) when Calories are restricted typically ~15-30% (up to 25-60%) of normal for that species (1-3). The ideal notion is to supply sufficient nutrition with minimum Calories. Note: you don’t get life bonus points and extra Calories to eat by purposefully concentrating biologically active compounds [insert supplements] and ingesting them in huge doses not found in nature – health doesn’t come in a pill or powder. Chronic overnutrition isn’t solved with more food or nutrients. For over 150 years nutrient content is the catch-all buzz to market excess food.

This idea of Calorie restriction should invoke a similar curiosity in everyone: if one continually restricts calories by 15-30% of normal, shouldn’t a point of diminishing return eventually be reached? In other words, if a certain number of calories are “necessary” to maintain a person or organism, restriction below that number for a lifetime should eventually catch up. Can one truly be in “deficit” forever? Let’s not ask politicians; after all Lavoisier got decapitated for meddling in such political nonsense. It’s still an interesting question: how much is enough food?

Creating Permanent Change

Over the last 5 years I took a decidedly different approach to the problem from the proceeding 20+ years of relative “failure;” I couldn’t control my weight and had biomarkers inching in the wrong direction. Looking back now, especially after spending the last few months on a journal manuscript, countless self-experiments, and coaching dozens to success, I can summarize my perspective by offering a simple shift in two questions that drove all of this work.

1) How do I lose weight -> Why do I gain weight?

2) What do I eat? -> How is the food I eat processed?

While these might appear to be nearly identical questions, it turns out they are extremely different questions and the answers cause conflicts with many popular “schemes” about food and metabolism. With that, let’s segue to one area of metabolism you absolutely can have a dramatic impact on even at the cellular level.

Power Plants and Fuel

We all know that in order for an engine to run an oxidizer and fuel must be supplied. The reaction creates new products and typically a lot of extra heat. When the Space Shuttle Main Engine used to fire, hydrogen (fuel) and oxygen (oxidizer) were combined to make water and obvious extra heat.

The hydrogen and oxygen fuel/oxidizer were contained in the large External Tank in the center. The solid rocket boosters (on each side of the ET) used Aluminum for fuel and ammonium perchlorate for oxidizer. I think it is fascinating to think that the same basic chemistry of a rocket engine is used by the power plant of cells, the mitochondrion, deliver energy to live and move.

Instead of rocket fuel, hydrogen, mitochondria use amino acids, monosaccharides, fats, and alcohol for fuel. Combined with atmospheric oxygen, they oxidizer, they produces ATP + waste heat. The waste heat is managed and that is what maintains our temperature – we are designed to live in environments cooler than body temperature in order to dissipate this excess heat. ATP is the currency of energy in the cell and you can learn more if you want in this tutorial at Kahn Academy.

I am only dealing with FAT/CHO in the graphic, because ultimately the fate of the other macronutrients (amino acids/alcohol) end up inserting into the CHO pathway. Later we’ll clear up some of the many myths of ingested versus endogenous sources, but suffice it to say one doesn’t store alcohol (in coolers doesn’t count). Breaking down of tissues for either indispensable amino acid stores or back up energy is not as common as portrayed as it is easily avoided with even modest amounts of ingested whole-food Calorie.

So we have a fuel currency and everyone wants to believe the obesity “problem” is a simple macronutrient ratio. We hear it’s fat. No, it’s protein. No, it’s carbohydrate. The truth is that we all simply “eat” too much. Chronic overnutrition is THE problem, because in the real world, Calories are scarce. That is why I find the mitochondrion and mild cold stress so fascinating. These are inextricably linked and our biology has provided a way to not only recycle that waste engine heat, much like the heater in your car, but in certain situations stop producing ATP altogether and just create heat.

What is even more fascinating is that while BAT seems to get the center stage in the press, every mitochondrion in your body has the ability to play in this ATP/heat exchange. It turns out that mitochondria even have their own DNA – separate from the genes that make you, “you.” In the last few years, scientist have been toying on the edge of some incredible work that addresses a certain mitochondrial DNA diseases (4), and you can explore that more here and here. I’m not thinking about jumping into mitochondrial DNA modifications at the moment, but it is important to ponder just how independent these tiny power plants are and consider the overall coordination involved in them working in unity.

With the exception of red blood cells, all your cells contain these powerplants and they are not only at the center of this waste heat production I’m always tapping into, but also at the very root of aging. What seems paradoxical is that caloric restriction actually increases mitochondrial biogenesis (formation of new mitochondrion); that’s more power plants created on a diet of less fuel. Overall, the point to keep in mind is that each mitochondrion decides: 1) what fuel to use based on a host of coordinated signalling, 2) whether or not to produce ATP, and 3) is capable of generating an enormous amount of heat.

Record Breaking Wisdom

Wim Hof Breaks World Record for Remeha Sponsor.
October 18, 2013.

A little over a week ago Wim Hof broke another world record – one hour and 53 minutes in direct contact with ice. He’s demonstrated numerous time this ability and although it’s been shown that he can generate up to 5 times the amount of heat of younger, healthy (untrained men) he would be the first to humbly say, anyone can do this. He in fact has trained many people to adapt to mild cold stress and today we will look at science that backs up his claims.

There are numerous other medical benefits, but let’s move beyond. I think it is funny to note that when I visited him last during a Netherlands winter, he always reached for a jacket when we went for walks or to the grocery store and we laughed at the fact I just threw on a pair of gloves and a hat. The iceman has a coat.

Now, I am not trying to imply I can take him on in dueling cold, but wish to point out we all have these habits. Today, I will give you a few things to change as winter approaches that will tweak these habits and help you adapt. Back to mitochondrial response to cold shock. The first thing to recognize is that these responses happen at the cellular level. Each cell is it’s own little domain, and although coordinated and affected by overall endocrine activity, they have the power to bypass ATP production in defense of cold shock (5). Next is to understand that heat generation not limited to the mitochondria in BAT. Every mitochondrion contributes via the normal cellular activity resulting in 80% waste heat, but further, they can all take it up a notch and give us the the extra 20% in heat instead of ATP.

Adapting the cool approach

In 2008, researchers demonstrated that muscle cells also contribute significantly to adaptive thermogenesis. (6). In this study 11 lean men were tested at 22C and 16C inside a respiration chamber (a whole room indirect caloriemeter). Even though activity actually fell during the period of mild cold stress, total daily energy expenditure (TDEE) increased. After a baseline measurement of 34 hours at 22C, they were measured for 84 hours at 16C (60F). This temperature was picked so as to not induce shivering.

Qualitatively, it happens to be exactly the temperature I find that the most people can tolerate with little period of adaptation. A biopsy from leg muscle (M. vastus lateralis), was taken after each test period and later analyzed for mitochondrial uncoupling. Those results clearly demonstrate it is present. The authors also note that epinephrine has been reported to increase total body energy expenditure of up to 40%. What this means is that whether you have BAT or not, you can still adapt and create non-shivering heat. Not only that, but it’s more energetically favorable to skip the ATP step (shivering/exercise) and just dump the high-calorie stored fuel (FAT) directly to heat.

We learned in A New Eye on BAT, that Irisin produced in a response to exercise promoted the “browning” of white adipose tissue and caused them to join the Muscle/BAT heat game. The puzzling paradox was that of a tissue encouraged to “waste” energy by producing heat as a response to increased activity. At first, these two actions would appear to conflict: excess activity causes tissue to be formed, which in turn creates 100% waste heat instead of ATP involved in cellular activity and survival. As examined from the larger perspective it seems like an energy death spiral, but if exercise is viewed as a modern day mimic of shivering, this is a more effective way to keep the body warm – i.e. it conserves energy.

Even though exercise and shivering are primarily an activity of high respiratory quotients (i.e. glycogen/CHO, not FAT), the body does have a system to efficiently adapt to a dense fuel source (FAT) without the deleterious tissue breakdown associated with prolonged/intense muscular activity. Earlier this year, two related research projects showed up.

The first looked at the simple acclamation progression of exposing subjects to an environment temperature of 15-16C (60F) for 10 consecutive days and then looked at the activity level of non shivering thermogenesis (NST) and BAT. (7) At the same time they surveyed three key indicators of comfort: How are you feeling (temperature) now? Do you think this is….(comfortable to uncomfortable)? and Are you shivering?

What is not too surprising is that after 10 days all of the questions saw a significant improvement (move towards comfort/non shivering). We’ll discuss this below. The acclimation also increased NST by 10%. Remember, this is heat generated directly through mitochondrial activity bypassing the shivering/ATP step. While no rise in RMR was detected (I suspect they didn’t measure during cold exposure), they also don’t report RQ, so there’s no way to tell if an increase in fat oxidation was associated with the acclimation. They do state that the mitochondria became sensitive to fatty acids with the exposure. The also briefly discuss the lack of skeletal muscle recruitment seen in earlier studies by same team (above), but suggest it might be linked to intermittent exposure vs the previous continuous exposure.

Finally, It was interesting that BAT was detected in 94% of participants before and 100% afterwards – a long way from just decade or so ago when it was believed we lost all BAT by adulthood. Overall the detectable BAT quantities increase by 37%. And let’s go back to the test conditions…we are talking about 60F (15C) for only 6 hours a day! This is a great fall/spring day whether you happen to now be in the Northern/Southern hemisphere. This is NOT cold…nor is it an ice bath or extreme. It’s the equivalent of spending a couple of hours in cool, not cold conditions. This is something everyone could easily accomplish.

Spice it up.

Figure 1 Contribution of BAT to whole-body EE.
(A and B) FDG-PET/CT images of subjects with detectable (A) and undetectable (B) activities of BAT. (C) Whole-body EE at 27°C and after 2-hour cold exposure at 19°C. (D) CIT. (E) Fat-free mass. (F–H) Relationships of fat-free mass to EE at 27°C (F), EE at 19°C (G) and CIT (H). (I) BAT activity. (J–L) Relationship of BAT activity to EE at 27°C (J), EE at 19°C (K), and CIT (L).

The second paper was from a team in Japan and looked at 2-hour mild cold stress (17C/62F) treatments for six weeks, 19C/66F 2-hour exposure on energy expenditure (EE), and compared these to daily ingestion of capsinoids (pepper extracts) for six weeks. (8) Similar to the study above, a clear association of mild cold stress and increased metabolic activity was demonstrated.

In this study of 51 young men, a little over half showed BAT that was activated by the one time exposure to 19C (see Figure 1, E). Of the detected/undetected, both saw a significant increase in EE (c), but those with BAT saw 252 kcal/day vs 78.8 kcal/day. They also saw a strong association between fat-free mass and EE – in other words resting metabolic rate scaled with fat free mass.

Reflecting back on our Part 3 of Muscling Your Metabolism, don’t forget that lean mass scales with weight – ladies (and men), pay attention here – the more you weigh the more lean mass is under the “fat suit” to carry around those extra pounds and the higher your metabolism is to support such effort. (9) At the same time let’s also not forget that it’s also been demonstrated that the average daily energy expenditure of traditional hunter gatherers was no different than that of modern day Western (US and European) counterparts after controlling for body size; as such, “lifestyle had no effect on total energy expenditure.” (10)

So let’s look at this clearly, and accurately, in terms of my simple question above: if putting lean mass on to burn calories (clearly demonstrated in this and other studies) was our main concern, then the bigger you are the more lean mass you have and the higher the metabolic rate.

Further, if we are all just suffering from too much sedentary lifestyle and just need to go roll more boulders and chase a few antelope, then this isn’t very consistent. Your metabolism or lean mass is likely not the problem at all and that’s why one can continue to run marathons and not lose weight. We eat too often, too calorie dense and too much.

Spread the word: you can’t out exercise your mouth.

Now, back to the mild cold stress. What is also interesting in a cohort of similarly aged young men that fat-free mass was closely tied to EE at 27C, but not at 19C during mild cold stress (see: F-H). So this clearly distinguishes between BAT contribution to EE vs fat-free mass. But like the study above, the 6-week, 2-hour a day exposure to 17C/60F resulted in an increase in both BAT activity and BAT detection: individuals with no BAT detectable at the start showed active BAT at week 6 (see Figure 2A in the paper).

Obviously anyone paying attention here should see the conflict, maybe in these short term acclimation studies (intermittent) BAT becomes the first line of defense (if you have it). Further, if you don’t have BAT it seems that one can recruit it. Finally, there are also examples that even skeletal muscle can contribute in chronically cold (read natural winter exposure pre modern world). We’ll address this in the practicum below.

Whole-body EE before and after chronic stimulation by cold and capsinoids. (A) Effects of repeated cold exposure for 6 wk. (B) Effects of daily ingestion of capsinoids for 6 wk. ( from supplemental methods)

Finally, this study had this interesting twist of the effect of capsinoids from a specific pepper (do you hear the supplement companies beating your door down?). This is actually an interesting class of non-pungent capsaicin from a sweet pepper (CH-19 Sweet, Capsicum anuum L.). Reasoning that the increase in dietary induced thermogenesis was related metabolically to the heat rush stimulated by pepper exposure, they tested in a cross-over, randomized, single-blind trial comparing placebo/capsinoid capsules ingested daily for 4-6 weeks… and it worked!

Those receiving the capsiate had an increase in EE similar to the same treatment with mild cold stress.

That’s actually surprising and an interesting result. Once again, they didn’t report the more important figure, RQ, which would tell us how much more of this EE activity is actually helping contribute disposal of stored fat. I have first hand data that the cold exposure does decrease RQ over time (moving towards more fat metabolism). It would be interesting to see if that played out here as well.

The Practicum – Your Autumn Experience

Ok, so we moved all over the place today and I am always asked for practical applications of all of these intellectual curiosities. With a few extreme exceptions, the move-more message to burn fat and increase metabolism is pretty weak at best. Further, the lean muscle burns fat argument, while true, is mostly irrelevant. What you put in your mouth (future post) every day has far more effect on your results if fat-loss is the goal. If you want to run faster, jump higher and swim farther – exercise is the solution. Wim is challenging the endurance portion of exercise, but that’s for another time.

This is not to say one can’t have a profound impact on metabolism with mild cold stress, but even that is not going to make up for the $1 buffet; you can’t out exercise your mouth. The only exercise guaranteed to work is to isometrically clench one’s mouth in the presence of excess calories. Let’s assume you’ve picked your dietary regime, be it paleo, vegan, body for life, whatever… and you want to lose.

Fall is an EXCELLENT time for the adaptation we see in all of these studies. This is the natural period where cold ushered in and our bodies are designed to adapt – everyone can do it, don’t use the pathetic story of cold natured, big boned, or genetic destiny. Instead, ease into it.

I have given out one prescription for muting your immediate response to cold and increasing your cold (and paradoxically hot) tolerance. I call it: 10-20-10x and it is a procedure Wim Hof and I developed together based on both of our experiences. First, you need only a GYMBOSS timer (you can contribute by getting it on my Amazon store or there is a free App) and a shower (consider the silicone skin for $2).

Finish the cleaning part of shower at a normal temperature (hint, slowly reduce your shower from scalding to normal-warm over a week or so if steaming shower is your thing). Then you’ll do 10 seconds of warm followed by 20 seconds of cold and repeat that interval 10 times (10-20-10x). You want to end on cold for a minute or two. It will suck pretty bad at first, don’t say you weren’t warned. That being said, it gets not only tolerable, but the best description I’ve heard is you’ll eventually get the same “runner’s high” after a race. It really gets you going.

What is going on during this crazy exercise? Vasoconstriction/vasodilation is alternating and blood is pulsing to and from the extremities. Believe me you will feel it in your fingers, toes and scalp. Ladies, I am told a cold water rinse with hair closes the cuticle and my South American female followers SWEAR this tightens the buns and skin – I don’t know, but it’s a bonus if true. What you will find is a very perceptible increase in mood and well being – this boosts the endorphins and gives a great morning rush. It also will slowly mute your response to sudden cold, be it opening the shower door, the office door, or cool water. Your body eventually doesn’t panic in the “fight or flight” sense to sudden cold exposure and that helps with overall comfort.

As well, I think this is superior to just cold showers if that’s already your thing. The constrict/dilate method is additionally a great way to alleviate post workout soreness. Here is the modification I would make: fill the tub with cold tap water before you do this and then sit in that after the 10-20-10x for 5-10 minutes – need to submerge farther for upper body workout. Even without ice, you will see a significant difference in following and next day in soreness – even if you are just starting to exercise.

Glove before sweater, make you look better.

So this brings me to my final couple of observations. Don’t be afraid of cool temperatures. I am not suggesting you go out and brave dangerous cold levels (0C/32F air and 16C/60F water are the lower limits in my book), but do the reverse of common layering with skiing – bring your layers WITH you and layer as necessary; don’t wear them and remove when too hot. Are you really going to freeze walking from the house to the car…in the garage? What about from your parking space to the warm office building? How do we dress different in summer and winter when the environments we inhabit are virtually the same?

These small times of exposure both condition you and as we have seen today have real, measurable effects on your overall metabolic pathways. Drop the thermostat a bit – it doesn’t take extreme and you will get used to it. This isn’t extreme as I have been suggesting for a few years and we don’t need super-human feats of ice endurance, not even Wim believes this as the champion of champions on the subject. What I want everyone to do if you want to get in touch with the real biological self is expose yourself to the seasons, they matter. If you live in an extremely mild climate, then invent them.

Remember, the only species that get sick and chronically ill are us and the pets we keep warm and fed: they get the same diseases and struggle with obesity. It’s not their little doggie/kittie treadmills and the amount of “protein” in their food – it’s chronic overnutrition. Animals conserver and so did our ancestors, despite what your rope climbing, tire-tossing, five-toed shoe friends want to believe. I see consistently .6-.8 lbs a day loss in my clients with no exercise. Sorry again for the long delay. I am sure there will be a lot of discussion.

I don’t want to debate diet at the moment, so let’s stick to the subject and be respectful – I am thrilled that our many comments have avoided the trash-talk elsewhere. Have you been doing contrast showers for a while? Let us know your experience?

As always, I’m not selling books, supplements, or bad ideas and I self-fund my research, so if you like this PLEASE donate and perhaps consider a regular contribution. It’s appreciated and all of it goes to my mid-life crisis metabolic lab, gadgets and historical textbooks.

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References

(1) Guarente, Leonard. “Mitochondria—a nexus for aging, calorie restriction, and sirtuins?.” Cell 132.2 (2008): 171-176.

(2) Haigis, Marcia C., and Leonard P. Guarente. “Mammalian sirtuins—emerging roles in physiology, aging, and calorie restriction.” Genes & development 20.21 (2006): 2913-2921.

(3) Koubova, Jana, and Leonard Guarente. “How does calorie restriction work?.” Genes & development 17.3 (2003): 313-321.

(4) Tachibana, Masahito, et al. “Mitochondrial gene replacement in primate offspring and embryonic stem cells.” Nature 461.7262 (2009): 367-372.

(5) Fujita, Jun. “Cold shock response in mammalian cells.” J Mol Microbiol Biotechnol 1.2 (1999): 243-255.

(6) Wijers, Sander LJ, et al. “Human skeletal muscle mitochondrial uncoupling is associated with cold induced adaptive thermogenesis.” PLoS One 3.3 (2008): e1777.

(7) van der Lans, Anouk AJJ, et al. “Cold acclimation recruits human brown fat and increases nonshivering thermogenesis.” The Journal of clinical investigation 123.8 (2013): 3395.

(8) Yoneshiro, Takeshi, et al. “Recruited brown adipose tissue as an antiobesity agent in humans.” The Journal of clinical investigation 123.8 (2013): 3404.

(9) Prentice, Andrew M., et al. “High levels of energy expenditure in obese women.” British medical journal (Clinical research ed.) 292.6526 (1986): 983.

(10) Pontzer, Herman, et al. “Hunter-gatherer energetics and human obesity.” Plos one 7.7 (2012): e40503.

Muscling Your Metabolism (Part 3)

By admin On May 27, 2013 · 342 Comments

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 your body” with even more energy. Those shakes are only helping to the degree they are displacing higher calorie food. Take a look at any study that shows statistically significant effects usually has paltry overall results (normally far less than 2 lbs a week).

It seems many emails, blogs and conversations all end up with the word cravings sprinkled on top. Somehow we are to believe that because we crave something it’s an indication of need. Our cravings are about as good of indication of nutrition as the food pyramid or the Hot and Fresh sign at Krispy Kreme. I’d argue they are practically worthless and craving is a term of addiction, not survival and health.

You can’t out-exercise your mouth.

Let’s take a look at a few exercises and some of the claims about metabolism and I think it will be clear that exercise has many of benefits, but burning fat is not at the top. I apologize in advance that this is going to get a little technical, but it’s absolutely necessary if we ever want to expunge the nonsense from the weight loss and fitness industry. This was the most difficult blog to write to date, because I really want everyone to understand this concept. It is so critical and I hear EVERYONE throwing around the M-word as if it is undeniable fact.

Wired For Truth

When Steven and began discussing a proposed article (read Wired article here), he kept coming back to the same question: how can we know that cold had a certain impact on your progress? I guess the simple answer was that I changed so few variables that the impact was self-evident, but the far more certain way is to measure. My goal was to lose weight back in 2008 – not write a book, a blog, interviewed in magazines and TV, or give a talk. I didn’t really care much about ANY of this until June/July 2009 when so many others, like Tim Ferriss, made such a big deal out of the results. I just did it because it made sense to me and it did have a solid technical basis. I didn’t know for certain that it would work.

Since then a combination of defending the results and being encouraged by scientists I enormously respect to take it further has fueled the crazy self-experiment obsession. Along the way I haven’t given much thought to proving a point as much as understanding the underlying science. That gives one a certain intellectual freedom, because it doesn’t matter what the answer is as long as it is the truth.

We now have seen in Muscling Part 1 and Part 2 that metabolism has two important components: RMR and RQ. The first, RMR, is a short term measure of a person fasted at rest and that measurement (typically about 15 minutes) is projected over the next 24 hour period as an estimate of total energy should be used if no additional activity occurs. It’s in a sense a minimum, or floor measurement and your total expenditure will likely be higher over the day. RQ (respiratory quotient) is a breath by breath analysis during the period measured of the % Fat and % Carbohydrate being utilized. It tells us how much of each fuel is being used. Like RMR, RQ is EXTREMELY sensitive to activity and is constantly changing to accomodate the body’s fuel needs.

When Atwater and others performed their experiments a century ago, they were not only collecting the carbon dioxide exhaled, but also the heat that evolved from each test subject. This would be direct calorimetry, because the heat evolved during this oxidation (burning process) is related to the fuel burned. Not only can it be measured – it can be measured very accurately with simple thermometers of the day. Today, indirect calorimetry, measuring O2 consumed and CO2 produced, indirectly determines the energy dissipated and it matches what they measured over 100 years ago.

Over a century…that’s pretty incredible.

So if someone is talking about boosting metabolism, lean mass burns more than fat, or post exercise/eating metabolic boosts, remember that one can’t simply repeat these things and it suddenly makes them true. We actually have to verify that it is as stated. The simple question one should ask is: how do you know? So let’s blow a few more metabolism myths out of the water.

What’s Your RQ?

alcohol lamp used to calibrate RQ and RMR on an indirect calorimeter

Alchohol lamp used to verify RQ and total energy burned

We’ve learned RMR, or metabolism rate, during any activity isn’t enough to know anything about fuel source. You might be burning alcohol, carbohydrate, fat or protein – you don’t know. While your diet does influence short term calorie consumption (within hours of the meal), it really has no impact on the bigger picture of what happens for the remainder of the day or what fuel is selected for your exercise of choice.

To assess that, we need RQ. This you will remember is a ratio of the CO2 produced to the O2 consumed and the number is very specific to the type of fuel used. Let’s use for example an alcohol lamp burning grain (ethyl) alcohol for fuel. Alcohol has an RQ = .67 and when I drop this alcohol lamp into a bucket and sample the air continuously that’s exactly what I measure – a straight line at .67 and a RMR of 5,074 kcal per day. That lamp fire is a little over the energy equivalent of two people to put it in perspective If I weigh the lamp before and after the experiment, I can in fact verify that not only is my system displaying the correct RQ, but also measuring the overall energy accurately.

By using calibrated gas mixture of Carbon Dioxide/Oxygen, a calibrated syringe to measure volume displaced on each breath, and alcohol flame to assess the fuel consumption rate, we can KNOW what is happening before/after a meal or before/during/after an exercise. This isn’t new, in fact we learned in Muscling Part 1 that this exact technique was used back in 1790 by Lavoisier and later by Atwater and others after the discovery of the macronutrient fuels, protein, carbohydrates, fats, and alcohol. With all biological systems there is a certain variability above us, but we got these measurements correct. How we decided to use them is a completely different story.

It should come to as no surprise to anyone that reads this blog that the terms “protein, carbohydrate, fat” are not the arbitrary “food labels” your, government, food packager, dietitian or fitness coach chooses to place on the items that constitute a meal. In fact it was the process of making these measurement that I came to realize how absurd these labels are unless your goal is to over eat calories in pursuit of some magic macronutrient “ratio” or every nutrient inclusive, “balanced meal.” Either way, I am pretty certain when we measure activity, meals, sleep, mild cold stress, etc… using indirect calorimetry that we can know with some accuracy and precision how much energy the body is using and what it is burning to get there.

Taking a Swing at Kettlebells

I will take some “heat” for this, so let me begin with the same disclaimer I’ve given on exercise in general. We shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Even though I don’t think exercise is a particularly good way to lose weight (in fact it mostly slows it down), does not mean I am opposed to it or think it is unhealthy. Likewise, I love kettlebell swings, so please don’t take this as some sort of assault on exercise or even kettelbells in particular. This just happened to be an easy target. I could have used nearly any “fat burning” activity aerobic/anaerobic to make the point.

Anyone that’s performed these exercises will tell you that they are a great physical exertion, but what happens when you have a $30K machine that let’s you peer into what makes that swing FEEL so good? What’s really going on? I want you to take a minute and Google: kettlebell metabolism

You should get MANY hits. WOW. look at those very first ones:

“A short and intense kettlebell workout will crank up your metabolism for another 38 hours.”

“This will elevate your metabolism for up for 31 hours.”

“If you want to burn more fat, improve your fitness, and ramp up your metabolism, try doing kettlebell jumps at the end of your workout.”

“Kettlebells can help to stimulate a metabolism because of the way kettlebell activities force a body response through balance challenges and resistance.”

…and so on

We KNOW it’s repeated over and over (I’ve said it, >gulp<), but I can tell you that it simply is not true. If you are a personal trainer, a fitness blogger, or a writer, let’s take the time to verify what’s repeated. If we could just spend a year on correcting the myths, we’d all be better off. Isn’t everyone sick and tired of the contradictions? Once again, I love kettlebell swings and have my own routine developed for post-weight loss physical conditioning (I am close to testing it out on a increased strength/fitness challenge after my next weight loss tests are completed in June/July).

Steven Leckart Kettlebell swings – 20 sec exercise, 10 second rest, repeated 10 times.

What’s the truth?

Let’s review that MOST people will post a resting RQ ≈ .85 and that corresponds to ~ 50/50 CHO/FAT ratio. This means if you wake up in the morning and have a pulse, you’ll expend about half of your daily RMR calories from fat oxidation. But what happens in explosive exercise, like the kettelbell swings I had Steven do? First, here’s the exercise: a simple 20 second swing, 10 second rest period, repeated 10 times. We began with a full RMR/RQ test earlier and then the test protocol had him standing still ready to exercise for 3 minute “starting” RMR/RQ.

I’ve tried to simplify the plot to highlight the changes in Steven’s metabolism. In this case we see his cumulative calories burned vs time (red line). You can easily see when the rate (kcal/min) changes by looking at the slope of the line. The steeper the slope, the more energy Steven is burning in that period.

We see that he starts out during a 3 minute rest, or baseline period, and then the exercise begins. He continues to exercise until the 5 minute mark at elapsed time of 8 minutes and then we look for recovery. The blue dashed line I’ve added represents the calories he would have burned had he just stood there. The entire test is over in 20 minutes.

So let’s do a couple of checks to make sure we are in the ballpark. At the far right hand side you see the dashed line ends up at ~ 44kcal/20 mins. An hour is 3 times this, so this would result in an RMR of 132 kcal/hour (3 x 44), or 3,168 kcal/day – quite a lot for a guy that is 5’7″ and 134.9 lbs.

But that is correct, because his true RMR (fasted and lying relaxed) measured a couple of hours earlier was 1,984 kcal with an RQ = .80 and now he is standing and probably a little nervous before the test. Here I want to demonstrate just how variable the number is we all call metabolism. His total calories burned in 20 minutes was 70 kcal, but 44 kcal would have happened anyway, so the total burned due to the swings was 26 kcal – a little more than a half teaspoon of coconut oil or a little under two teaspoons of table sugar. When people (even me) do these hard calculations of calories in/out, note that the out portion can be widely varied. We will come back to FAT/CHO burned, let’s continue with the metabolic “boost” everyone is raging about.

Follow the red line. You see it ramp up with activity and then as soon as he puts down the weight, he begins to recover. Your metabolism is dynamic and designed to conserve. I estimate that the energy rate hits pre-exercise level about a minute or so after he’s done – worse case let’s call it two minutes. Ok, but energy is only half the story, so let’s turn to RQ.

Where’s The Boost?

It’s simply not there in energy consume, but perhaps it’s buried in the RQ as raging, metabolic fat burning. Let’s take a look. You’ll see 4 sections and in each a box with RQ average for that section. These four divisions approximated when shifts in his RQ occurred. He begins at RQ = .84 (47.2% CHO/52.8% FAT). During exercise this climbs to RQ= .98 (93.6% CHO/6.4% FAT) and then to an average RQ = 1.02 (100% CHO) during the recovery phase which lasts about 8 minutes. During this time his RQ is drifting down and by minute 16 he’s at RQ = .87 or (57.5% CHO/42.5% FAT). We end the test at minute 20.

The truth: His metabolism returned to normal after 2 minutes and his RQ within 8 minutes. Sorry folks, no raging metabolism – it was news to me as well. We’ve been duped.

It’s not rocket science and exercise physiology has taught for a long time that these explosive energy modes are not driven by huge utilization of fat. Elite endurance athletes burn more fat than the rest of us, but they typically don’t burn 100% fat during the activity. Volume training encourages their body to burn fat earlier into the exercise and that avoids the carb-crash when glycogen stores are spent.

So why does everyone say it? Why is it repeated, debated, instructed when it’s so easy to disprove? Perhaps, sometimes people want to believe in something so much, they begin to use the words think and believe interchangeably and in doing so, avoid the thinking part all together. Today, there are many similar examples I’ve found food, blood sugar, etc… and in time will demonstrate. Internet has facilitated an explosion of fitness/diet bloggers and monday morning scientists that read a handful of papers, use many multi-syllable words, and back it all up with citations at the bottom of the page, but never measure. I guess it’s an intellectually toxic cocktail of incompetence and ignorance, but I’m afraid it’s no longer the exception.

One might expect this from evening and weekend warriors, but we hear this from degreed, educated, trained, and certified people as well. I will admit I have said it before and there is simply no excuse for it. I’ve spent the last four years in an obsession to get to the bottom of something that’s quite easy to understand once you get the memorized drivel out of your head. It was an expensive “hobby,” but I’m prepared to change the lives of 10,000 people and I don’t intend on selling pills, powders, screenings, and procedures. I am after real, measurable, demonstrable and accountable change for a more healthful life. In the mean time, let’s just not forget:

You can’t out-exercise your mouth.

Chilling Truth About Cold Water

steven lechart wired magazine cold stress

Steven sitting at the bottom of the swim spa for a 20 minute immersion to measure calories and %FAT/CHO during an immersion test.

Swinging Kettlebells is not why Steven was visiting my home lab on that hot, humid summer day. He was here to learn more about cold. By now anyone that reads my blog knows that I am not really an advocate of misery and lean toward mild exposure over longer time. That’s simply not something one can easily test during a hot, Alabama August day and he was only here for 5 days, so we did the next best thing, turned down the thermostat.

I have an 8 x 14 ft Tidalfit swim spa that’s temperature regulated from 45F to 105F (~8C-40C) using an AquaCal heat pump. Our goal was to compare 20 minute swims at 80F (26C), 70F (21C), and 60F (15C). We also looked at a 20 minute jog at a leisure pace of 5 MPH. In all cases we wanted to bring the exercise level down a notch testing to what extent the advertised “fat burning zone” exists.

Finally ,we performed two immersions, where the goal was to “relax” as much as possible so that the cold portion of the contribution would be separated from activity. At that time, my calorimeter was relatively new and so this represented the first opportunity to really dig in with a complete set of data keeping in mind the the foundational science is over 100 years old. We weren’t really challenging old science, but rather adjusting the collective “mind hive” speak that’s resulted from people repeating incorrect, or generalized, “facts” over and over until it becomes widely accepted.

Let’s discuss the big picture here and compare/contrast swimming with kettlebells. Again, so as not to be misunderstood, I am not suggesting kettlebell swings or weight lifting have no value. My goal is to focus everyone on misguided notion that metabolism, or lack activity, is the reason they are obese or even the reason the last stubborn “belly fat” is hanging around. As well, I want to assert that other than dietary intervention, most exercise is an activity revolving around glycogen and doesn’t really impact or significantly decrease your body fat levels.

We basically live in this realm of RQ = .85 (50/50) and exercise always moves that number UP not down. Elite endurance athletes burn more fat and volume training makes it better, but for the average person, all of that sweating and jumping creates far more metabolic needs of repair and risk of injury than warranted by the amount of body fat consumed.

Simple relationship of exercise, calories expended, and metabolism

In THIS regard, a calorie isn’t a calorie – not because they aren’t equal, rather, because an activity may preferentially prefer one fuel over the other.

In every case of activity analysis, I want you to also remember this imaginary slope upward and it’s progress over time. Before you begin, the energy expenditure you would have burned had you not exercised, could continue on for the same time at the gym. Now add exercise and your metabolic rate increases momentarily and then when you stop, it goes back to the original rate after some period of time. During the increased rate of calorie consumption, our cells shift toward the glucose/glycogen economy unless one is completely glycogen depleted.

Swimming is actually fundamentally different from all other forms of exercise. First, it’s not an activity of explosive power, it’s a sport of technique. I’m not suggesting elite swimmers aren’t powerful and explosive; sprinting can occur in competitive races. One can swim leisurely and significantly reduce the exerted force, but there’s another prominent change in the thermodynamic balance: the rate of body heat loss to the water. What we are doing effectively is pulling the heat from the outside instead of pushing it outward by revving our muscular engine and creating obligatory waste heat.

With that let’s turn once again to Steven’s cold tests. I’m not going to go through all of them at this time, but I want to point out a few things that should become second nature. First, take a look at the “shape” of his curve swimming. You see the same basic shape as in kettlebell swings above – the gentle slope, then steeper when swimming and finally back to the original slope. Nearly all activity fits this general picture as did his 20 minute jog. If we ramped up the swimming effort (or even running speed) that middle section would have progressively steeper sections, but it does return back to “normal” or resting at some point after and we demonstrated it’s way less than 30 hours.

Remember that metabolism, or energy consumed, varies throughout the day, but the total energy is only HALF of the story and not even the most important half for most of us. The number we are after is RQ, which gives indication of how much fat consumed in any given time. If ~~weight~~ fat loss is your goal, this is much more important.

Taking the Plunge

20 Minute tethered swim in 70F water with 20 min post swim recovery.

With swimming, there is a distinctively different signature on RQ. This was the middle case, a 70F (21C) 20 minute swim followed by ~ 25 mins of post swim monitoring. First, you’ll see that Steven starts out just like any other activity and then he moves into the actual swimming phase with the increase in metabolism. Once finished, he gets out and recovers (on a HOT August day) while continuing to measure.

Swimming burned ~130 kcals, but what is really interesting is RQ. It starts in a normal range of RQ = .82 (40.3% CHO/59.7% FAT), rises during the swim to RQ = .98 (93.6% CHO/6.37% FAT), and then he begins the recovery phase. There is a little twist here in that Steven was shivering for the first 8-9 minutes. Not violently, but definitely shivering (see video from WIRED article upper right) and we see a slight drop to RQ = .95 (84% CHO/16% FAT). Then the shivering ceases and RQ falls to .75 (12% CHO/88% FAT) where it remains until the end of the test.

The numbers were almost identical minute by minute for a swim at 60 F and at 80F it looked much like one would expect for running or other activity. Mild cold stress, as has been reported begins at 80F, but it requires longer exposures with less activity. I didn’t repeat the same at 75F, but I feel pretty certain through other measurements that’s where the upper end of the temperature range is located.

We also did immersions tests and this also turned out interesting. First, I had him divide the 20 minute exposure into five sections sequentially immersing: feet, waist, hands, shoulders and head. 80F was somewhat uneventful as one might imagine on a hot Alabama afternoon – he smiled way too much. Now, 60F was way more fun – for me, not him. First, the the data didn’t have the sharp change in slope like all the others here, they were much more subtle. There was a change when his feet went in and it stayed constant until his shoulders went in and there was a larger change. That’s where it ends, because we measured for a total of an hour, but 37 minutes after steven exited the pool his metabolic rate still had not return to baseline. RQ was a different animal.

Despite his sitting motionless for the entire test, RQ matched swimming, almost to the minute , the results seen during the 70F/60F swims, with the exception of the “activity phase,” where RQ peaked at .88 (60.8% CHO/39.2% FAT) as compared to RQ = .98 swimming. Once he had overcome the 8-9 minutes of shivering on exit, (probably felt like hours to him) he was once again down to RQ = .74 and remained here for last 25 minutes with no shivering until the end of the test at 1 hour. We don’t know how much longer it would have continued.

Final Thoughts

What does this mean practically speaking? The sweet spot for swimming is likely somewhere in the 65F-75F range and you simply have to pick a temperature where you feel most comfortable. It’s best to swim at a leisurely rate – don’t push it. When you get out of the pool – don’t jump in the warm shower or hot tub – that defeats the purpose of the heat deficit created by the mild cold stress. I’ve seen data that suggest free fatty acids remain elevated for hours and it’s most likely the body’s upregulating mitochondria via UCP-1α using fat to produce replacement heat. This might also explain and be directly related to the connection with exercise and the hormone irisin, which encourages new BAT growth (see post: A New Eye On BAT). I’ll add that this is also why you’ll want to stay away from a high calorie meal in the window following the cold stress activity, which could shift RQ away from fat and it’s best if you don’t eat at all. If you are going to eat, I suggest a high fiber, nutrient rich/calorie poor meal. That being said if weight loss is your goal, use a high fat diet of thunder thighs, beer belly and big butt as your primary fuel. It won’t go away until you metabolize it.

I think it should be obvious why one should abstain from exercise if you want to lose fat rapidly. First, your muscles don’t atrophy overnight. I am not asking you to lay perfectly still, just don’t do anything that looks like a repetition or makes you sore/sweat; living is enough activity. Walking, going for a leisurely swim, or biking is okay, but don’t turn it into a race. Playing with the kids, throwing a frisbee or walking the dog all keep you active. Your body KNOWS it needs to burn fat on a restrictive diet and it’s not going to burn lean tissue just because it is there.

On the other hand, if you insist on tearing down tissue exercising, every time you do you are shifting the body away from fat burning (rise in RQ), post exercise recovery DOES require food to fuel the tissue breakdown/repair, and the chance that you’ll maintain these needs/consumptions in perfect balance is low. The more common tendency is to over eat. No one I have coached has loss lean muscle mass, but certainly their apparent “strength” goes down. This okay, because there is muscle memory and a few weeks in the gym once the ideal weight is reached and you’ll be back to where you began.

The sports research we tap into when generalizing to the population at large was mostly performed with the idea increasing performance/endurance. For many of you that is a goal and not competing doesn’t win the gold. Exercise is an option for the rest of us. The problem of course is that we’ve taken this information with a broad brush and painted it onto every person overweight and suggested this obesity pandemic is one of inactivity. I don’t believe this is the case. When one makes an informed decision about how they want to lose weight and has a choice between rapid weight loss without significant exercise or slower weight loss and risk of injury with it, then they are actually choosing.

On the other hand, blaming the weight issue on a slow metabolism, lack of activity, or avoiding the connection that one is chronically over-nourished, obfuscates the problem and frustrates the person trying to make a change. Finally, we have the ridiculous, ubiquitous metabolism claims bombarding us every day. Your metabolism likely isn’t broken unless you don’t feel a pulse and then it doesn’t matter much. You might have metabolic dysfunction due to chronic over nutrition, but that can be greatly improved, or completely reversed, with proper diet. Why have we all become obsessed with being “diagnosed’ with dysfunction as opposed to seeing the overwhelming evidence that our society is deluged with cheap, ubiquitously available, cheap food. We eat too much – stop eating and you’ll see instant results.

This post is not gear toward elite athletes, or any competitive athletes at all. There are ways to exercise at lower levels of RQ. The point I am trying to make centers on the barrage of metabolic boosting claims and “fat burning zones,” which all disproportionately suggest that if a person is overweight, lack of activity caused or was a major contributor and more activity is going to fix it. The root problem is one of intake not output. Either way, we need to all understand that no matter how hard we work, our ability to eat and the modern day access to enormous calorie sources must be taken into account.

I am certain that weight loss is a catabolic process and it’s a process of conservation, not excess. If you want to run faster, jump higher and swim farther then you won’t succeed without conditioning. Although after my two year exercise hiatus, I have been thinking about challenging that notion too. Certainly there’s nothing wrong with exercise and many benefits, but fat loss, especially rapid fat loss, isn’t one of them. You might say, but it makes me feel so much better and I would reply you can get the same serotonin hit from mild cold stress in a contrast shower, stop eating, get within striking distance of your ideal weight as soon as possible and then resume exercise. It is a choice and it’s not the only way, but the myth of metabolism pushes many in a direction that ultimately fails.

That’s all for today. whew, got through it and I know I lost a few of you, but hopefully you’ll stick with it.

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Muscling Your Metabolism (Part 2)

By admin On April 4, 2013 · 183 Comments

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. Over the last few months I have had many discussions about metabolism – of course I am intentionally provocative, but the responses just flat out amaze me.

First, I truly remember “believing” the same things. Certainly we all can’t test every truth – you don’t have to be a whale to write Moby Dick. With that said, when there is vast disagreement with our actions, observations and results, it serves everyone equally well to double check.

Oh the Thinks You Can Think!

“If you restrict your calories, your metabolism will fall and you’ll go into starvation mode….” I typically reply, and what? Will my metabolism be ZERO? How much will it go down?

It isn’t unreasonable to ask a few rational questions? Shouldn’t we pause for just a moment to think about what we repeat? What absolutely amazes me is how fervently people can disagree about “opinions on metabolism” who have never measured a single metabolism in their entire life.

Until I started talking about this more, I had no idea that metabolism is right up there with protein, carbohydrate and fat – speak. I had some misconceptions for sure, but I can’t say my opinions weren’t nearly as dogmatic as some encountered. With that said, I was wrong, but learned a valuable lesson about what extent I now allow myself to slip into group-think.

I wouldn’t have debated with someone that was experienced measuring metabolism at that time and I am certain that anyone who spends significant time with an indirect calorimeter will agree – the word metabolism is broken. You might as well be reciting a few lines from Dr. Suess:

“Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try! If you try, you can think up a guff going by. And you don’t have to stop. You can think about schlopp. Schlopp. Schlopp. Beautiful schlopp. Beautiful schlopp with a cherry on top.”

Schlopp with calories on top. We learned that resting metabolism rate, or RMR, is really the bottom of what anyone might burn over the next 24 hour period. It doesn’t include the excited phone call when your significant other is late, or the heated debate on mac vs windows, or taking the stairs not the elevator. What RMR represents is an approximate 24 hour projection of what you will burn given the same level of rest. It’s commonly measured after a minimum of 4 hours post meal/exercise and best if done on waking in a fasted, rested state.

Metabolism has two components: the base, average 24 hour number, RMR and the much more important number, the respiratory quotient or RQ. The latter term as you may recall is the ratio of carbon dioxide exhaled to the oxygen consumed. Since the different fuels (e.g. carbohydrates and fats) burn with slightly different chemistry mixtures of oxygen, this ratio gives a real-time measurement of what fuel, or combination of fuels, is burning at any given time. The food you eat and the way you move impacts this ratio. As well, so does training.

For example an endurance athlete’s body learns through volume training that it better start using fat as a fuel early in the race. If not, they will “bonk” and run out of the most common fuel of activity, glycogen, which we learned is a way our body stores glucose for later use. In the next post I will go over some data from Wired article author, Steven Leckart, during few days in my lab last summer.

Hitting the Wall (with my forehead)

For now, let’s discuss this in very general way. In round terms, one of my dismal discoveries during weight loss tactical planning was that a marathon (26.2 miles/42.2km) only burns about 2600 Calories – approximately 100 Cal/mile. The problem is, it get’s even worse. If we compare this number to the amount of glycogen stored in the body ~1500-2000 Cal, we see that this storage can only fuel 58-77% (1500/2600 to 2000/2600) of our race. If we multiply this times the distance of the race, we get: 15-20 miles (24-32 km). This is hitting the wall. It’s caused by insuffcinet utilization of fat during the initial hours to supplement the mostly glycogen fuel of running.

As it turns out, most exercise is simply an activity based in glycogen. We will see this in more detail in part three. What no one seems to tell you is that the “fat burring low-intensity zone” you see on the treadmill or elliptical is based on no fat burning at high intensity. In other words, if you take a full on sprint, your RQ is headed to 1.0 (carbohydrate) pretty fast – you likely will be over 1.0.

I’ve not seen anyone push it hard and stay at RQ = 0.7 (fat). By comparison, sitting in your home or office reading this, you are likely at RQ = .85 (50/50). So “fat burning zone” really refers to more fat burning than none, not more fat burning than when you aren’t exercising. Now, theoretically your lower fat burning crosses a line with increase energy consumption – an exercise sweet spot.

Many of the gym-grade calorimeters (US$3000-12,000 class instruments) use this fixed RQ = .85 “assumption” when calculating your RMR, which is why they are not as useful when trying to get at the details of specifically how your body is reacting minute by minute. Researchers of 100 years ago were using all wet chemistry techniques and as such, were’t burdened with this problem. We’ve known these things for a long time, I am not making it up. It’s only in the last few decades that this lack exercise/activity has become the be-all answer. I see better results from people that are’t moving excessively, but rather focused on enjoyable leisure activities (a dog walk, casual swim, or riding a bike)

Here is what those fat burn charts really mean. You were likely burning at a 50/50 rate when you walked casually into the gym. After beginning to run you’ll not burn much fat at all, because your RQ will go to 1.0 or higher. If you don’t push as hard on that marathon you MIGHT be down as low as RQ = .95 (84%/1%6 carb/fat). In that 2600 Cal/26.2 miles, we are talking about 416 Cal or 3.5 tablespoons of “healthy” olive oil.

Scaling Tall Building

So recently, I decided to put it to a little test. What would happen if I climbed the Westin Tower in downtown Atlanta? At 73 stories, it’s the second tallest hotel in the U.S. and 19th in the world. I haven’t exercised in 2 years as part of an ongoing experiment, but my muscle mass hasn’t changed in any significant way and I am frequently experiencing cold stress.

This was going to be fun, of course when you have a gas mask on, along with a beeping backpack and a camera, it’s probably good to ask security for permission. “I can’t tell you that it’s okay, but I can say there aren’t any cameras and it’s perfectly okay for the guests of the hotel to use the stairs.” said the man with the ear piece – enough said. So my partner in crime, Kevin and I calibrated the US$ 34,000 instrument with standard O2/CO2 gas and we were on our way to the basement.

We had to walk down a few floors so I rested about 30 minutes while he made technical support calls and then we performed a short baseline, rested metabolism. Remember, when you see the number on the treadmill or elliptical, it’s necessary to subtract out the calories that would have been otherwise burned during the same time just by being alive.

Up the stairs we went. 20 mins later, we were at the top. Not bad for a nearly 50 year old, no exercise father of three. I was a little winded, but we made the 1784 linear feet (~1196 stairs) and 700 vertical feet) at a steady pace of 1.4 mph. Not exactly pushing it.

The result? 4 1/2th Oreo cookies. three stinking cookies and I am NOT talking double stuff.

I know that this wasn’t two brutal hours of crossfit, nor was it a good upper body trip to the gym, but where is the truth between 3.5 tablespoons of olive oil and 4 1/2 Oreo cookies? How far off can we be?

We all want to believe that all that sweaty movement is burning a lot of calories. It just SEEMS like a lot of work and in physics work and energy expenditure are two totally different quantities. Sadly, this mindless repetitive movement we call exercise seems to fit neither of these definitions in a significant way. Not only are there few calories burned, but they are mostly glycogen (carbohydrate) calories and result in a lot of metabolic upheaval to replace and repair tissue. A few months after my first cold experiments Segway and overall brilliant engineer, Dean Kamen, told me that he too had calculated the food-for-movement economy when conceiving the segway – he came up 1/3 a chocolate chip for 100 m climb (~30 stories).

We are relatively easy to move around.

Did you hear me say don’t exercise at all? No. Did I say exercise was unhealthy? Well, not yet, but I reserve make that judgement to later. What I am saying is that if you are competing, there’s no way to win without being conditioned through training. In swimming, it’s about technique and muscle memory (streamlining efficiently through the water). In running and cycling, it’s a game of fuel conservation and primarily oxygen utilization (VO2 Max). And in weight lifting, it centers on stressing the muscle and giving it sufficient time to recover and rebuild.

I’m exercise agnostic at the moment as it’s enjoyable to many people, but do want to respectively question the main reason that is offered as a fundamental, unquestionable truth: Are we obese as a society because we don’t move enough? Is it really our lack of activity that has caused this obesity pandemic?

Lose, or Lose Not. There is No Try.

If you are trying to lose fat, exercise is probably not the best place to start. In part three I will give you a few examples why, but there is a LARGE leap from the “lean mass burns more than fat” catch-all phrase to the generally accepted idea of sedentary lifestyle. What that phrase should be is:

In a petri dish when measuring the metabolic activity of equal mass of muscle and adipose tissue, the muscle tissue is more metabolically active and consumes more energy during a given period of time.

Now let me give you a little “Alabama” talk:

A 300 lb fat man burns more calories wallowing around each day than his lean, fit, 180 lb. friend.

It doesn’t matter much how much their tissue is burning per hour if you’re the same “skinny man inside the fat suit” lugging around an extra 120 lbs of fat all day, every day. It reminds me of the childhood riddle: which weighs more, a ton of feathers or a ton of bricks?

This is not a metabolism problem, it’s a food problem. The excess bodyfat is due to what we eat, when we eat, and how we eat. That’s all. Exercise has a role in health, but it is not the panacea for health or the explanation for the obesity pandemic.

I have now coached several life long, morbidly obese people through a weight loss process. Nothing makes them feel more miserable than to walk into a gym full of fit people with iPods, and feeling as Daniel once described, “like I was wearing something made by Omar the desert tent maker.” Life is a workout when you are 30, 50, or 100+ lbs overweight. Slow metabolism is not your problem. Oh, You don’t need to eat the storage organ (fat) of a plant or animal to burn fat from your own storage organ. How does this even begin to make sense?

Once we begin down the path of protein, carbohydrate and fat – speak, then sprinkle some metabolism speak and add some missing nutrients, we find the recipe for obesity. In reality, chronic over nutrition is far more prevalent than your situation being a deficiency problem – activity or nutrient alike.

Things are repeated over and over, but I hope we all do a little more critical thinking. Over that last 4 years, I have met so many intelligent people and asked a lot of seemingly obvious questions. It turns out there’s a big difference between 40 years of experience and one year of experieince 40 times.

Oh, and lest you accuse me of being an academic snob, I will say that the debates are sometimes MORE intense with PhDs. The great thing is that I now have a lab and can say, well, tell me what you think is going on and let’s just measure it. I’ve learned a lot just answering questions my children have involving Dad’s mid-life crisis calorimeter. They tend not to be as ill-advised, yet.

So next time we will get into some really interesting comparisons of activity. We will look at Steven’s results and shuffle through to some interesting cold stress experiments touched on in the article along with some other crazy stuff that didn’t make it.

Carbohydrates – Part 2

By admin On October 21, 2011 · 41 Comments

In Part 1, we began the process of distinguishing the difference between a food group and a macronutrient. Carbohydrates (Carbs) are probably the most vilified of the macronutrients. This is probably due to the ubiquitous availability of starch foods throughout human history. For the most part, oils, fats, and meats were the food of the rich. Everyone else ate beans, rice and potatoes.

If we listed the many staple foods: grains, rice, beans, squash, quinoa, potatoes and corn we see a high amount of starch. Remember, starch is simply a long chain of glucose. We all need glucose to live and our primary energy is derived from glucose and stored glycogen or fat (more later).

I want you to know that a carbohydrate need not be fattening, nor lead to diabetes. In fact, Carbohydrates can be very satiating (1) for 4-5 hours after meals. What seems to be the big diversion, where the “bad carbs” come in, is the processing (blending, frying, flouring, pasting, etc) of carbohydrate. When we break down starch too much in the food preparation process, it leads to lots of simple sugars. These are both easy to overeat and can have other deleterious health effects.

Starch digestion begins in the mouth with the amylase in the saliva. The starch begins to break down to glucose. A great way to experience this first hand is to take a unsalted cracker and just hold it in your mouth. You will begin to generate a lot of saliva and as you hold it there, begin to taste sweetness as the glucose is formed. Remember, a termite can do exactly the same thing with cellulose in wood.

From an evolutionary biology perspective, the AMY1 gene that is responsible for making amylase is so important that you have as many as 12 copies of it (2). It was extremely important to our hunter-gather predecessors. While there’s been much put forward on the “hunting” side of the equation, some of the most recent anthropology suggest that the “gathering” side dominated. Underground storage organs (USOs – tubers, bulbs, corms, and rhizomes) played a significant role in our energy management of times past.

Men like the idea of beating their chest and running through the woods hunting and they write a lot of the stories, but gathering is actually a better (less sexy) explanation of our survival. It even allows the elderly to participate productively in the group, even grandmothers would have a significant role in the earliest tribes. Anyone can dig up a potato, they aren’t very fast, and they grow in predicable places.

The naked mole rat is found with archeology of hominid population explosions and points to USOs as a gathered food source. click photo for NPR Story

Many of the early tools used to process USOs were probably made of wood and didn’t survive in the archeological records, but the early Hominid starch crystals in teeth have. Also there are also fossilized populations of mole rats that surge with every human population expansion (3). We’ll also learn that the mole rat has some FASCINATING genetics that impacts thermal loading.

I don’t want to get into the Paleolithic debate. What I want everyone to see is that starch IS an important evolutionary part of your fuel system, but at the same time recognize french fries are NOT the starch I am talking about. Your view of carbohydrate has been jaded since the beginning of diets. In the earliest of diets (Banting) it was simple breads combined with butter/sugar that caused the excess energy to creep in. Processed starch (sugars) of all kinds can lead to excess caloric intake; it’s just easy to digest and pleasurable to overeat, especially when combined with salt and fat.

For today, understand that primary complex carbohydrates: squash, legumes, onions, carrots, whole corn, whole rice, and potato are all good bases of energy. They are satiating ways to make up for caloric deficit, but don’t confuse those items, “items your great grandmother would recognize as food,” Michael Pollan might say, with the “carbs” served at school lunch.

Most importantly understand that many of these “starchy” foods also contain significant proteins with complete compliment of the essential amino acids your body will use to synthesize your own protein. These complex carbohydrates are broken down by amylase to glucose: the fuel for your brain and many cells in the body. If they aren’t consumed with excessive alternate energy sources (like excessive fat or simple sugar), your body will tap into it’s own fat reserves. If too much pre-processing is performed, then you might see increased problems managing blood sugar.

Eating carbohydrate is convenient and pleasurable, and know there is room for “carbs” in your diet if you make the correct choices.

So, when we are putting this all together and I say carbohydrate, I want you to think about these whole, starchy food items that enter YOUR kitchen/cooking reasonably resembling how they came out of the ground or off the plant. Sugar, raw, brown…whatever, is refined. I challenge you to eat the 250 lbs of sugar a year gnawing on sugarcane, however; you might be able to do it with grapes or beets.

Others have commented on fructose, a simple sugar in fruit, and I think there is merit to the issues that come from too many simple sugars, especially highly processed. This likely includes high fructose corn syrup, apple juice, sucrose, agave nectar, etc…). Fruits are not found in nature year round, but USOs are. Similarly, think about what is easily stored (beans vs beets). It’s amazing to hear people rave about “natural agave nectar” (inulin/fructose squeezed from agave) and then begin to lambast the food industry for high fructose corn syrup (fructose squeezed from corn). Yes there are some differences, but we’ll debate it in 5-10 years. It’s all simple sugar to me and best avoided.

These simple sugars are energy without the fiber or micronutrients. Others, like Robert Lustig, have covered the issue of fructose in far better detail than I will, but likely our problem as a nation is probably more related to drinking, for example, too much apple juice, rather than eating too many apples. The same is true of french fries vs potatoes. The larger group health statistics just don’t separate the issues (e.g. apples vs apple juice or fries vs potato) with enough granularity and it is all complicated with saturated fats and other compounding, synergistic concoctions we now call food.

Many energy dense foods are now available year round (like fruits or avocados) and so we must be careful with these foods. We’ll see a similar trend with fats, oils, and nuts.

Starch is a wonderful molecule and has been around for millions of years. Starch is just one bond different from wood. You are designed to eat starch, with back ups systems in place (AMY1). We can identify paleolitic starch in teeth, even knowing the plants that produced it, and so there is nothing wrong with carbohydrate as a food – it highly processing it and combining with other energy-rich processed product that causes much of the issues.

You will inevitably hear more about the amazing work anthropologist, Nathaniel Dominy is doing with starch and USOs. I personally believe the depth and thoroughness of his work will have an impact on what many, like Loren Cordain, believe to absolute. Nate has a very uncanny ability to see past the obvious. For the record, he’s a meat eater, despite what he’s uncovered in the last few years about starch in anthropology.

In terms of the thermodynamics, most natural starches come with a compliment of other micronutrients that are beneficial. These are “energy foods” and so we absolutely CAN lose weight by eliminating them from your diet. I am not suggesting diets higher in fat or protein (atkins, paleolithic, slow carb) cannot be used to lose weight – I am diet agnostic. What I can explain is on whole the overall management of energy, heat (not temperature), that is responsible for your success.

If we stop isolating these foods based on our perceived/suggested notations of macronutrient content and return to simple food, A calorie will be a calorie. Once you learn to recognize what you are consuming at every meal (and snack) you’ll see the results you’ve been after. It doesn’t even take discipline once you understand the underlying principles.

Gauging on the comments/questions, I might dig in a little more (Part 3) on carbohydrate. Eventually I will post the overall biochemistry and some have written asking me to explain the TCA cycle (that complex part in the middle of a Lustig presentation if you’ve seen one). Otherwise, I will move onto fat and catch sugars in the wrap up.

Next week is TEDMED in San Diego. It’s hard to believe a year has past. I’ll probably have at least one update on what I learn there, but will *try* to write two posts on fat before I leave so they can post next week.

(1) Carbohydrates and human appetite, Blundell, JE, et al.,Am J Clin Nutr 1994;59(suppl):728S-34S.

(2) Diet and the evolution of human amylase gene copy number variation, Perry, G.H., et al., Nature Genetics 39, 1256 – 1260 (2007)

(3) Communication/presentation with Dr Nathaniel Dominy, Dartmouth University Dept of Anthropology

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Carbohydrates – Part 1

By admin On October 18, 2011 · 17 Comments

As we have been discussing, macronutrients are the basic energy, or fuel, our bodies need for all biological processes. This can be used for exercising, thinking or synthesizing the many biological molecules that keep the system smoothly operating.

Micronutrients are the building blocks – the stuff our body uses to create the many cells, tissues, and hormones. Like we discussed in our car analogy, macronutrients are the gas and micronutrients are the routine maintenance service for the car .

Today we are going to begin the discussion of Carbohydrates. What I hope to do, is change your reaction to that word. I don’t want you to say “carb” or think french fries, potatoes, or rice. I don’t want you to think about ANY food group. Forget glycemic index. Those are all useful bits of information for diet schemes, but not to understand how your body works. When we are done, we’ll move onto the other macronutrients: fat and protein.

So, do we have a deal? No discussion of FOOD for the conceptual understanding of carbohydrates, but I will give examples carbohydrates contained food so that we can understand the bigger picture.

Thermodynamics is the study of heat and energy and how these systems interact. We derive energy from the basic three macronutrients. Later, there will be detail of this complex process, but for now, it’s just a game of “pass the electron.” Every whole food you eat contains some amount of the three macronutrients. We call something a Protein or a Carb in response to its greatest portion of macronutrient by weight.

Now, we are discussing energy, the thermodynamics, and really weight has nothing to do with energy other than some means of quantifying the amount you eat. We’ll see that this macronutrient/weight is extremely useful for food labels, but not very indicative of either the amount energy or macronutrient you might derive from a given amount of food.Telt

Let’s dive into what a carbohydrate is and why we need it.

A Carbohydrate is a Carbohydrate

We’ll see that all this fuss about calorie a calorie is going to be a simple accounting issue, but if you have a negative reaction to the word carbohydrate, if you think that there are good carbs and bad carbs, if you’re worried about blood sugar, then fret no more. We aren’t going to discuss any of that here. Not going to even take questions on it.

Instead, I want you to return to 4th grade and think about that simple view of the world. You breath in oxygen, it’s combined with fuel (“burned”) to give energy and then you exhale carbon dioxide. That is in turn used by plants in photosynthesis, to yield sugars and other biologically active compounds and they return the oxygen.

See it?

We are all confused about the breathing oxygen and burning part, remember, a calorie isn’t a calorie? So, let’s start with the plant side of the circle. There aren’t many obese plants, maybe they’ve figured something out.

Plants take in carbon dioxide and form sugars, fats, complex carbohydrates (e.g. starch) and structural cellulose. With the exception of venus fly traps and pitcher plants, they just don’t eat. They also take in Nitrogen from the soil (fertilizer) creating proteins and even even psychoactive alkaloids, like mescaline (peyote buttons). It seems plants are a trip.

In fact plants synthesize every single protein, fat and carbohydrate you need to live. We eat them or we eat animals and bacteria that eat them and here we are. Perhaps this is what they didn’t tell us in 4th grade. Food and Macronutrients are somehow separated at birth of the concept, but we are here to discuss Carbohydrates, like starch and really understand what they are and how they work.

We all know the word sugars. There are natural sugars, bad sugars, processed sugars, and high glycemic sugars, but really, a sugar is just the simplest molecule that makes up the long chains of stored energy in plants. It’s their way of saving for a rainy day (literally). They all named to end in “ose” – glucose, galactose, lactose, fructose, maltose, etc. Once ingested, you extract energy from them to fuel ATP/ADP through electron transport chain.

For now, just know that your body MUST have glucose. That’s what we measure when we measure “blood sugar” and that is what your brain runs on as a fuel. It’s chemical formula, C6H12O6 is the building block of two very familiar compounds: Starch and Cellulose. Both of these “polysaccharides” (poly = many, saccharide = sugar) are simply long chains of the EXACT same sugar: Glucose.

House of Potatoes

Starch and Cellulose are made from the same building block, Glucose. They have a different saccharide bond that holds them together. Since many animals don't make the enzyme to break down cellulose, the fiber passes through. If you ever wondered how hippopotamus, rhinoceros, cows, and giraffes grow lean and muscular as herbivores, here's your answer.

That’s right, a baked potato and a wood are essentially the same thing. So why aren’t we whipping a wonderful Mahi-Mahi dusted in a fine pepper-birch sawdust and parchment-baked? It’s because we happen to be protein deficient. Yes, it’s true, a polysaccharide like cellulose or “poly-glucose” must be broken down by enzymes, proteins, into glucose so we can use them.

Cellulose is put together in just a slightly different way and we can’t break it down. To a termite, or the bacteria in the rumen (a stomach) of a cow, that piece of wood or grass fiber works as food JUST like a baked potato does for you. These bacteria and insects create the protein, cellulase, to extract glucose from cellulose. We create another protein, amylase, that breaks down the starch. You have as many as 4-12 copies of the gene that creates amylase enzyme, because it’s so genetically important for your survival.

Carbohydrate, fats, and proteins all enter the electron transport chain to deliver energy to your body in a set of reactions designed around glucose, the building block of carbohydrate.

What do I want you to take away? first, “Carbs” aren’t food groups and neither are proteins and fats. Theses very defined terms in organic/biochemistry, but have been popularized in order to help you “eat healthy. The irony is we’ve never been more unhealthy as a world. Proteins aren’t meat; there are also other bioactive proteins, for example enzymes like amylase or cellulase, that participate nearly every metabolic process keeping you alive.

We will eventually come back to food, and calories, and see that nearly every food you eat is a combination of these. You don’t “need a complete protein” and can’t “avoid carbs.” The truth is that what you need is energy to run the process, fuel. You probably have a few weeks (months?) supply of fuel you’ve been lugging around for some time. We need to find creative ways to burn it. None of them involve schemes of putting MORE energy in your mouth. You’ll never run empty if you fill up three times a week.

For today, here is what I want you to take away: carbohydrates are polysaccharides ( “many” “sugars”) that provide the basic energy currency precursor of your body, glucose. We’ll discuss some of the other (evil – lol) simple carbohydrates in the next blog. We use and need carbohydrate in our diet. There is a big difference between starches, like rice, squash and potatoes and donuts. Fruits, on the other hand, contain simple sugars as well and those come with their own issues. It is key to separate carbohydrates, especially complex carbohydrates, from simple sugars.

We’ll then turn to the other macronutrients, fat and protein, to fill in the basic metabolism energy cycle.

You shouldn’t feel uncomfortable with the idea that ultimately, cows eat grass, gain glucose and amino acids, and grow tasty, “grass-fed” beef. That beef is laden with amino acids. When you eat it, you can in turn use the amino acids (no significant glucose in beef) to create insulin or pus in pimples (also a protein), whatever protein you need, and metabolize the left over to supplement your daily energy requirements. You can even store it for “later.”

Perhaps, it’s not as simple as the CO2->Sun->O2 symbiotic respiration we learned in 4th grade, but it is plenty understandable. When you no longer see protein, carbohydrate or fat as food groups, your mind will be opened to lots of different options.

Equally important, we’ve all learned the hard way, you can’t out-exercise your mouth. It is simply put, impossible.

Until next time…

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Burn, Baby, BURN

By admin On September 29, 2011 · 43 Comments

As we discussed in the last post, I want you to suspend all that you know about carbohydrates, proteins, and fat. I want you to clear notions of glycemic index and eating for blood type. I’m asking you to not have conclusions about our paleolithic ancestors. No, let’s talk about the very basics of energy in our body, but check the Chakras at the door.

Today we’ll take a rather geeky-side step. We are going to talk about energy, oxidation, and heat (not temperature). These are all things that we can see, measure, and repeat. Let’s reserve comments to questions and clarifications – I don’t want a similar scheme from someone else. I am confident that what I am saying is true – to the best of our current understanding.

Quick background. We are “homeotherms” in that our body temperature stays constant. This temperature (around 37C +/-) is the net result of waste metabolic heat. We need to stay in an environment cooler than our body for the most part, so that the waste heat can leave – else we just burn up. Cars need radiators. We are the same. Heat (not temperature) always flows from hot to cold. At the atomic level, that’s just lots of atoms bouncing together – just like rubbing your hands together and getting warm.

Heat (not temperature) is then the net energy in that object. Hot coffee has MORE heat than your tongue. It transfers (rapidly) when you sip it. That is what causes the discomfort. That is a very visceral picture of heat, but in thermodynamics we talk about heat in a far more general way. Most of the discussion has absolutely NOTHING to do with temperature and in fact, temperature is something that goes up and down in many cases to preserve the balance of energy when heat is transferred.

Riding The Wave

At the top of a roller coaster, you have a LOT of potential energy just before you fall. At the bottom of the hill you have lots of kinetic energy (energy of motion). Stand on that track and splat, you are mowed over my the massive car. Chemical reactions release and absorb energy in much the same way. Hold some explosive in your hand, you have potential energy, light the fuse and bang, release of all that stored energy at one time.

Get the picture?

The process of extracting energy from carbohydrates, proteins, and fats is metabolic oxidation. We add oxygen to the “fuel” and “burn it” to release energy. This is a extremely complex process, with lots of steps, but we can attack the problem from the basic energy in, energy out approach.

Let’s say you eat some glucose…or even table sugar, sucrose. In both cases those two molecules have Carbon (C), Oxygen (O) and Hydrogen (H). These individual atoms are all linked together with chemical bonds. Breaking these bonds requires energy (pulling the roller coaster up the hill) and then releases energy (going down the hill).

Some of the energy does work – like move a muscle, beat the heart or fire a neuron in the brain, but MOST of the energy (80%) is just waste heat energy (not temperature) that gets transferred to surrounding tissue and the tissue then increases in temperature.

What we will learn on specific posts about carbohydrates, protein, and fats is that each of them is processed a little differently by the body, but all can be used for that fundamental energy we need to live (pulling the roller coaster up the hill).

Additionally, we’ll discuss that proteins have a dual use – they can not only be burned like fuel, but they provide a store house of amino acids that are the basic building blocks of our tissue, hormones, and hair. In that sense when you EAT protein, it is not USED by the body; rather it is broken down into amino acids and the body picks out the ones it needs to make whatever is on the “to-do” list – be it eye tissue, insulin, or keratin (hair & nails). The rest of the unused amino acids get tossed into the burn pile. We don’t store them. When we dig into proteins, you’ll see that this word is so misunderstood, that it’s caused huge problems. We’ll find why our body doesn’t actually “burn” protein in much the same way as our body can’t burn “starch.”

On the other side of the balance, fats are places our bodies (and plants) can store energy. We’ll talk about one other form of stored energy, glycogen, in the post on carbohydrates, but just remember that adipose (fat) tissue is a place to dump excess, non waste heat energy until you need it later (gas in the trunk).

So all of these hand-waving sentences: I need more protein to build muscles, high glycemic carbs are my problem, or it’s the good fat, are just distractions at this very basic level. If you were not fat, or competing in an intense triathlon, then really, any of these three fuel sources would do just fine for energy. All of them are acceptable for fuel. Some have more heat energy stored within and others have less. Some can cause secondary hormonal issues, etc…but your body has evolved to process all three of these. Alcohol is another fuel we can throw in the mix – it’s digestible, but the by-products are toxic; it’s certainly energy that can be processed.

Sweet Mistakes

Ultimately, it is glucose – a simple sugar (carbohydrate) that fuels your brain and keeps the cells nourished. We monitor “blood sugar” and for most of us it stays in a pretty tight range. Proteins and fat can be inserted into the process with some fancy tricks, but all the heat energy they contain is eventually assimilated to some part the overall system to process glucose.

What do you need to know from this to move on? Simple. These three macronutrients: carbohydrate, protein, and fat are all useful sources of energy. If you are about to run a race and are 6% body fat, you might want to stock up on energy. If you are worried about the scales and the only exercise you get is looking for the remote control, you probably have plenty.

Einstein said, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”

Weight loss, ALL WEIGHT LOSS, is then the process of going on a naturally “high fat” diet and consuming your body fat to fuel the roller coaster of life. For each and every heart beat, mouse click, or push up, you need some energy and you’ll want to get it out of your own reserves, not help plants and animals lose weight by eating theirs. If you only drink water, you’ll have no choice but lose body fat.

The problem with the starvation approach is that your body also has to constantly replace proteins (not necessarily your meat, but more hormones, cells, etc..) and in the next post we’ll look closer at how that complicates things and makes severe starvation, not the most appropriate form of weight loss.buy big water slides

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Meet You at the (Gas) Station

By admin On September 25, 2011 · 32 Comments

It’s been a crazy couple of months of travel, research, and writing for me, but I’ve learned some incredible new things. Over the last three years of personal transformation, an amazing clarity of overall energy balance of Human metabolism has emerged. T S Eliot wrote in the Gidding:

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”

I believe I have arrived where I started and I’ve never known it better. One of the difficulties in discussing a more unified approach is just how unbelievably misinformed we all are about the basic words involved in the discussion. The diet industry has bantered about protein, carbohydrate, fat, calorie, and many other terms to such a wide-extent that my revelation was simply going back to the basics.

In simple terms, it was necessary to purge the mental construct I had grown to rely on in the past when discussing weight gain/weight loss.

I really doubt that this confusion is driven by mass corporate conspiracy. I also believe that most who write diet books really believe their assertions and are motivated largely, because they want to help people. Everyone wants to profit and so I don’t condemn the large corporations for giving us what we demand/buy (salt, sugar and fat) nor the diet industry for rearranging the same message ad nausem to help you resist the three.

I will say the medical community, and in the United States, the USDA and NIH, on the other hand are probably more deserving of criticism. School lunch/breakfast programs begin misinforming our children at an early age and the net result has followed us all into adulthood to create a nation full of obesity. Now, this obesity trend is being exported to the rest of the world. Physicians are able to get a medical degree without a class in nutrition and when they do study it’s the USDA Food pyramid scheme.

I certainly appreciate the efforts of Dr. John McDougall and others for passing California SB 380 that mandates continuing education in lifestyle and nutrition in the management of chronic illness. Rather than mindlessly attack, I’d like to pick back up from last March and present a new foundation of the calorie and in particular, its relationship to the macronutrients, protein, carbohydrate and fat, so that we can all at least share a common language.

During this exploration of protein, carbohydrate, and fat, I will ask that you temporarily put aside what you believe at the moment and to the extent possible, suppress the diagnosis bias. I know that what I am going to discuss over the next few weeks is definitely contrary to what I was taught in undergraduate/graduate biochemistry class and what I believed to be true when I started my transformation; I also am confident that it is COMPLETELY consistent with the underlying science that was the foundation for nutrition.

Today, Seth Godin had an insightful blog entry that everyone should read. He’s amazing in both his deep insight to Human motivation, but most important to me, in his phenomenal ability to simply observe. These two sentences really pique my interest:

“You are welcome to believe that aqua metals will improve your sports performance and that z-rays will cure your arthritis, but only until it collides with things that are actually true. Placebos are a good thing, and everyone is entitled to their own beliefs, but they’re not entitled to their own science.”

And that seems to be the issue we have and it’s probably why you haven’t met your goals. He goes on to say,

“The trend I’m concerned with is the notion that we’re entitled to get upset when the truth doesn’t match our point of view.”

I’m both guilty of this and I have been the recipient of it from the other end. Fortunately, I am not motivated by politics, popularity, nor dogma, and so I am perfectly willing to change my opinion in the face of sound new data that is contrary to the data I based my previous opinion.

What is interesting is that when one takes a thermodynamic view of calorie, nutrition, and weight loss, it all becomes very obvious how the system works. It also opens the possibilities of alternate ways to view “food” and in particular what is going on in the very complex interplay of Macro vs Micro nutrients. Once you look through this new pair of glasses, it won’t be necessary to understand how the watch works to tell time.

For today, let’s just start with a very basic understanding of nutrition and I will invoke the much overused car analogy.

The Drive-Thru

To keep your car running you need two things: fuel and routine maintenance. The body is no different. The fuel can be in the form of Protein, Carbohydrate, or Fat and the maintenance is provided by vitamins, minerals, phytochemicals, and antioxidant capacities of food along with routine cardiovascular and strength conditioning. I don’t think anyone would disagree with that (long) sentence.

So, we have to routinely top-off the tank at the gas station and we also need to perform routine maintenance: change the oil, rotate the tires, check the timing belt, etc… So what happens if you show up to the gas station three times a week, whether or not you need gas? What if it became the center of business or social meetings, “hey, would you like to meet at the Exxon at 6 o’clock for a fill-up? or, Wow, it’s about time for some gas, I haven’t filled up for hours?

Thermal Loading provides a method of losing weight at maximum rate.

How do we KNOW we need fuel? Now where's the gas gauge again?

Ok, these days you would go broke, but think about it. If you show up to “socially” or habitually fill up, where does it all go? Eventually the tank is full, so you put in in a can in the trunk. Then the the trunk is full and now we put it in the back seat – eventually strapping it on the roof. I mean, we are going on a LONG trip and have no idea where the next station is…

Get the picture?

Ah, but true to life, it’s far more complicated. We’ve just described macronutrients (fuel), but what about micronutrients (maintenance)? If it weren’t for the pesky maintenance side, we could just stop eating and hopefully by thanksgiving (or pick your favorite holiday – they ALL seem to involve food) we would have reached our goal in time for pumpkin pie.

Can we just take micronutrients in a pill and fast? Again, it’s just not that easy. Starvation (caloric restriction) does appear to lengthen life according to studies. Then again, I am told it is so miserable you just THINK life is longer. HCG/Starvation is one form of popular “severe” restriction diet. If you don’t eat you WILL lose weight. If you are not losing weight then you MUST be eating too much. NO exceptions.

This is the duplicity in the problem. We can’t just give up food like like other out of control habits with out all sorts of problems. When we forego calories, we ALL certainly lose weight. We need micronutrients (maintenance) and many of them come in macronutrient (fuel) wrappers. So an optimal plan would involve restricting macronutrient calories, while getting the maximum micronutrients.

What many diets suggest is simply limit calories without regard to all the micronutrients and since it is only for a short period, there is no long term impact. Still others try to promote supplements or enriched shakes to bridge the gap. These are all short-term solutions and probably the reason so many regain the weight.

So in the next few posts, we’ll take a look at the three macronutrients (fuel): protein, carbohydrates, and fat and begin to unravel this evolutionary mystery. I’ll attempt to reframe them as fuel and give you a good way to think about not just how they the body “burns” them, but more importantly, how this ties back into the overall thermodynamic balance your body must maintain.

Fat or thin, fit or unhealthy, your body stays within a degree or so of it’s set point. It does so by managing HEAT not TEMPERATURE and we’ll see that a lot of the issues with perceived contradictions of the calorie come back to misapplication of macronutrient connections and an too much generalization about what your body really needs.

Pyramid Schemes

By admin On June 28, 2011 · 33 Comments

Personal perspectives are always plagued with some set of bias. For example, there are those that look at the great Egyptian pyramids as incredible acts of engineering prowess and still others that see the same building as representing a society that built with diminishing ambition (psssst, a joke). There is always an absurd way to categorize things and any time you base a theory, concept, or idea on a false premise, eventually that idea will crumble.

People can sell “snake oil” for a while, but eventually it will catch up with them and the facts (not opinions, perceptions, or feelings) will rule the day.

My Plate or Theirs?

I think it is certainly clear that the USDA Food Pyramid Scheme, is just that – a scheme and not a particularly good one. Recently we were presented with a “My Plate.” It’s certainly a step in the right direction. Not Earth-shattering innovation, but it at least it can serve as a foundation for a wide range of nutritional dialog. It’s got catchy colors, cool design, but take a look at it closely…

it doesn’t say meat.

ChooseMyPlate.gov - Is it Industry or Health Promotion?

Look at that. Most everything else on the plate is now in plain English: Grains (not breads), Fruits (not juice), Vegetables (not low glycemic carbs). Then there is Dairy (liquid meat – check out the nutritional labels and compare beef to milk or cheese) and Protein.

Does anyone REALLY know what a “protein” is? Isn’t that a Chicago song? Can you distinguish between a hydrophilic and hydrophobic amino acid or understand how these might affect proteins folding? If you could, would you care? The level of detail in macromolecular science is so incredibly complex today and yet we have many walking around with sound bites cashing in on the latest techno buzz-phrase pandering to the unknowing masses. Meanwhile, those trying to get funding for the basic research fueling this culinary renaissance struggle.

Saying protein is synonymous with meat, is like calling all rectangles squares. The good news is that there is now the foundation to separate this century old belief.

Rational Decisions

As people who know me will clearly defend. I am not AGAINST meat. I love the taste of meat, don’t have a personal issue with eating animals, nor do I focus on carbon footprints of steak. I am not trying to discount anyone that believes these things, but rather to put out clearly that I am simply not motivated by the politics or ethics of meat.

Yet I did live on a vegan diet for a little over a year. I did it as a “radical” self-experiment; you would have thought I was attempting to join a terrorist plot or cult by the reaction of some friends and family. There were those that thought it an unthinkable personal deprivation – akin to a prison sentence. Still others were overly concerned with how I would “get my protein,” yet none of them could really tell me what protein was or more importantly, how a rhinoceros, giraffe, or even <gasp> a beef-laden steer get’s protein when they are all herbivores.

Whatever protein is, the government wants to be sure you get some and make sure you get a little dairy too – all of the industry interest at the USDA need a “little help from their friends.” Sadly, I happen to LOVE sushi and chicken wings. I’m confident neither the mercury, saturated fat, nor animal protein are all that good for me, so I’ll significantly limit these from here on out.

And yet on my last few years of self reflection and intense study, there are many of the top ailments – Multiple Sclerosis, Diabetes, pulmonary hypertension, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, rheumatoid arthritis…the list goes on, which are all radically affected by diet and nutrition. I can’t IMAGINE having one of these and not giving this a try. I don’t understand the “I’d rather be dead then give up cheese” mindset. That sounds more like a heroin addict and less like a rational, or free decision.

My sensitivity and motivation was rooted in a looming trend towards Type II diabetes when I gave it a try. I used to have (and can more or less still induce with diet) bouts of hypoglycemia that was absolutely tied to my meal. It hit me within an hour or so and my friends saw it first hand. I was far more safe driving a car after doing four Jäger bombs, than eating a slice of cheesecake.

New World Order

Gary Taubes presents an interesting history of the media/medical PR machine in Good Calories, Bad Calories (2007) along with the political, socio-economic, scientific debates of Cholesterol-Heart Disease relations and ultimately Eisenhower’s own struggles to his nutritional-based death.

I want to change this thought by asserting two things:

1) a calorie IS absolutely a calorie in thermodynamics and

2) a “dietary calorie” is a very loosely determined set of averages related to a “kilocalorie” and isn’t necessarily exact.

Why this distinction? I have spent the better part of the last three years reading vociferously on food, diet, and exercise. Before that I spent a great part of the previous 15 years struggling with my weight. If you are overweight now, I get it and really do understand. What I have also learned is that a lot of people have made a lot of money on ideas they don’t really understand that well. Part of the issue is in the quest to make things “understandable” or generalized, it can often lead to further summaries that end up failing.

I believe that a dietary calorie is one of those things that is asserted with exacting detail when in fact it should be viewed more as an approximation.

The Art of Self Misdirection

Let’s take a quick diversion to something I am CERTAIN about, and then let’s see how these same steps might complicate the concepts around the dietary calorie. Certainly one of the best parts of the internet is that one doesn’t have to be a multi-million dollar corporation or famous spokesperson to get a message out. On the other hand, if you are viewed as a “reliable source,” you can unknowingly infect millions of people with incorrect information with a simple tap on the return key.

Here is a recent news piece from CBS MIami – Can “Chilling Out” On Ice Diet Help Lose Weight?

The actual news report (video) is quite accurate, even though they focus on the extreme, it covers the point made by both Tim and me. Clearly we have told everyone that these techniques are desinged to ENHANCE diet and exercise, not replace them. We point out, as do many, that “burning calories” (there’s those words again) isn’t that easy when compared to consuming them.

Having watched the video, read the story on the page. See the difference? Despite the credentials, Dr. Stacey Ingraham, is just wrong. In fact, this is the very point I made in my TEDtalk and unfortunately she isn’t alone. It is surprising just how many people confuse the body’s need to dump excess waste heat resulting from exercise as the cause of the energy consumption when in fact it’s a result of the body maintaining a core homeostasis. I tried to comment, but they were all rejected accept the one post asking that a comment be posted.

Not sweating it… Just know that many people that might be help will be confused. This doesn’t just happen with the media – it’s also common when science is summarized and generalized, which brings us back to the calorie.

First, we must look at thermodynamics with great respect. The laws have worked well and while they can be disproven if there is data to do so, no one has ever found any evidence to the contrary. This is the difference between science and dogma. So this is where I can state unequivocally that within thermodynamics a kilocalorie is the amount of energy to raise 1 kg of water 1 degree Celsius. It’s a simple definition and it does not change, nor can it be avoided. In thermodynamics, Heat (not temperature) = energy. It’s repeatable, measurable and observable.

Where we do have good reason to doubt is that 1 “dietary calorie” = 1 kilocalorie as it was defined over a century ago. I’ve participated in the past, and many of you still participate in nearly certain indisputable discussions about X calories of protein vs Y calories of carbohydrate. No matter what mental image you might have about a calorie of this or that, what each conversation, idea, and method involves is a basic estimate on digestibility and absorption of those macronutrients in order that it may be used, stored or excreted by the body.

This is the point where thermodynamics and food split paths. This is where I was able to achieve a thermodynamic advantage. This is where good calories/bad calories, body for life, sugar busters, slow carb, and Atkins all tweak and twist to make us all believe a “calorie is not a calorie.”

So is this all about semantics? I don’t think so. I am not going to take issue with any of these diet schemes; I’ve used all of them and they all worked for me to restrict calories. I was the one that ultimately couldn’t stick to them or make them a lifestyle.

A Plate Full of Schemes

The My Plate scheme is probably the best the USDA has ever done in helping people move towards a good balance. I think people can lose weight with either choice of protein: plant or animal. Plant will get you there much faster and my blood work suggests a much healthier landing.

Dairy? I think it’s seen it’s better days and yet I REALLY love cheese. When I look at the label and try to rationalize eating it, but giving up “red meat,” the rational debate goes right out the door. Liquid beef seems a better way to couch it for my mental process.

Changes in Diet and Lifestyle and Long-Term Weight Gain in Women and Men. Bars to the right indicate these food tend to cause this weight gain over each four year period. Bars to the left are weight loss associated with that category of food.

I think most people are in fact trapped by what they THINK or are TOLD is healthy and the sales and marketing on the package, ESPECIALLY THE NUTRITION LABEL. It’s a sad case where in order to label the widest range of food, we have distilled down the categories and quantities until the point where the labels are not very meaningful. Take for example this: “Zero Calorie Olive Oil” I have in my pantry (hint ALL oil has calories and NO ONE sprays it for 1/3 of a second).

That’s all just plain dishonest and our children are suffering because of it.

Now looking at the chart to the right is anyone REALLY surprised by the results? This study published in last week’s New England Journal of Medicine tracked 120,000 men and women during a 20 year period (1986-2006), my fat years (1). During that same time I picked up an extra 50 lbs – go figure. Ok, don’t just rationalize your favorite junk food (cheese and yogurt looking good), but take in the entire picture. Bars to the right create a tendency to gain weight eating those foods and bars to left tend to lose. The length of the bar tells you how much on average.

Sure, you are not surprised, but what are you doing to change the trend in your life?

The Hot Points

Simply put – without some way to generate internal heat, you would assume whatever the temperature of your immediate surroundings. We don’t and it requires energy to create this heat in everyone and the energy source is food. If you control the food going in (nutrient dense, calorically poor foods – like plants) and exercise to strengthen your cardiovascular system and create excess waste heat, you’ll lose weight.

If you further expose your body to COOLER surroundings: swimming, cold showers, less layers, morning/evening walks, or just turning down the thermostat, your body MUST burn more or drop in temperature.

The resistance to change in temperature, the external thermal load on your body, depend on how large the temperature difference between your body and the environment and how fast heat (energy) is leaving your body. 40F water is a lot more drastic than 40F air, due to the increased heat capacity and thermal conductivity of water. A change of only 2-3 degrees down in water is equal to many more in air.

Swimming WILL positively effect your body’s heat loss and as such, will also trigger hunger. Resist the urge to eat and you’ll lose faster, guaranteed.

No amount of discussion changes these scientific facts; what is up for debate is how we might effectively and comfortably add these thermal loads to our lives. We don’t have to guess about calories in thermodynamics, maybe we should stick to words and food groups in diet schemes that people truly understand.

1) Changes in Diet and Lifestyle and Long-Term Weight Gain in Women and Men, Mozaffarian D et al. N Engl J Med 2011;364:2392-2404.