Currently viewing the tag: "protein"

calorimeterLet me start with a request: I need your help getting our new paper open source fee funded. Here’s how this publishing process works: there are legitimate journals and trash journals.  Some have higher reach than others (impact factor). If someone wants to be “published,” they can find a journal to put their work in print. Ideally, the peer-review process proceeds something like this: one submits to a journal, the editorial staff accepts or rejects the manuscript for the review process. If selected, it moves, blinded, to a panel of reviewers that are experts in the field Read Full Article →

kickstarter, Our Broken Plate, Skip a meal and your body will begin to hold onto fat. We should eat frequently to keep our metabolism up (ugh-I said this all the time). The most important meal of the day is breakfast. I’m not getting all sciency today. I will ramble a bit.  We’ll talk at a much higher level. There’s been a lot of reductionism in nutrition and metabolism and it is spreading fast. While the internet has provided unprecedented access to information, it’s also allowed a lot of science babble to infiltrate every subject and diet has to be the gold medal champion. Everyone eats so Read Full Article →

MetabolcWinterThe last year left enormous personal progress.  It’s been a difficult year in terms of time, but scientifically rewarding. There are many reasons people launch blogs. Some need attention. Others need authority. Then there are others that are bored.  Probably the most common are those that just want to make a contribution in an area that find passionate.  Health, fitness, and cooking are among the top blogs and there are many, often conflicting, opinions on the subject.  While people might “agree to disagree,” there are many opinions that are just wrong.

This blog really started, because Tim Ferriss insisted I put “something” Read Full Article →

calories burned with kettlebell swings - boost metabolismYou can’t out-exercise your mouth.

It is a fundamental truth and a brilliant evolutionary strategy.  Exercise has many interesting impacts, both positive and negative, but if you’ve been chronically obese, I want to encourage you not to start here. Not only are you putting your heavy, out of shape body into an increased risk of injury, but until you’ve been successful in the one exercise that ALWAYS works, you’ll simply eat your way through any progress.

What is this magical exercise? Isometrically clench your teeth in the presence of fattening foods and excess calories.  It’s necessary to control appetite, not “fuel Read Full Article →

IMG_0794The curtain is pulled back and the great OZ is exposed.

If you want to run faster, jump higher and swim farther, then there’s nothing that replaces planned biological stress that trains muscle memory and invokes hypertrophy. That being said the idea of calories in – calories out doesn’t fail because a “calorie is not a calorie,” but rather because the output isn’t really exercise.

You can’t out-exercise your mouth.

While this became fundamentally important to me years ago, it is only in the last year that I have had the ability to dive in and actually test it. Read Full Article →

gloves before sweater make you look better - how sleeping chilled can thin your thighs. Over the last 6 months, we’ve spent a lot of time on macronutrients and food. I believe (and can prove) the common protein-carbohydrate-fat speak paradigm is broken. These macromolecules are all well understood scientifically, and yet conceptually, real food doesn’t come in simple little packages; macronutrient density/percentage varies from food to food. Even when we attempt to cluster foods together with the these labels, it doesn’t capture the dynamic and interchange of the overriding metabolic rules and microbiome influence.

Generally speaking, the more refined one or more macronutrients in a “foodstuff,” the more unhealthy ingestion becomes. Take natural “sugar” for Read Full Article →

As we wind down this journey, I hope you can clearly see the problem with the very simplistic “molecular biology” approach to our biological systems. More than one time during the last two TEDMED events I heard that this approach is dead. The idea that we can use a reductionist attitude to manage one hormone or one macronutrient and have widespread impact has failed repeatedly.

Sugar and oil (not foods, but refined energy) will probably end up being the exception.

We now know that there are a “symphony of reactions” that happen in our body and it is far more Read Full Article →

After 4 months we are finally nearing the end of our dietary journey.  We discussed the basic context of Macronutrients (protein, carbohydrate, and fat) as “fuel.” We learned that there is a group of Micronutrients – vitamins, minerals and phytochemicals that all constitute “service” or biological maintenance.  We understand that fat has more energy density (2x) than protein or carbohydrate.

Our body uses primary fuel glucose/glycogen through the TCA or krebs cycle to obtain energy (brain biggest single user, followed closely by liver and muscle)  and the body stores a glycogen (a special muscle protein with a carbohydrate shell) and Read Full Article →

NASA Protein Crystal Growth (PCG). High quality crystals grown in microgravity to determine 3 D structureCan you pass the protein? I’ll have a little protein with that. I’m dragging a little, I think I need some protein. I’m really trying to bulk up, what are you eating for your protein?

Okay, I admit I was of the same mindset. I once recommended “one serving of protein and one serving of carbohydrate with every meal.” I lost 50 lbs on that advice and yet when challenged by a 11 year old girl with a simple question my “belief system” was stopped in it’s tracks. I took biochemistry in undergraduate and graduate school. I worked in the Read Full Article →

the facts on Fat and weight loss. In Fat – Part 1 I explained some details about our body’s use of lipids (fat) and the role it plays in both survival and diet.  The most important concept to take away is that you MUST go on a naturally “high-fat diet,” digesting your OWN adipose tissue, to lose weight.  This may seem so incredibly obvious, but if you take a few minutes each day to think about it, I believe it will have profound impact on your results.

Why? because every calorie you put into your mouth will fuel your body and that will result in the part Read Full Article →