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Let The Games Begin

By admin On November 18, 2014 · 55 Comments

It’s hard to believe that this is only my second post for the year. Where did it go? I’ve not been sitting idle. First, a big thanks to ALL of the people that contributed to the open source fund for the Metabolic Winter Hypothesis paper. Not only did we reach the goal in under a week, but the paper has been a huge success. It broke all download records for the journal and remains their number one downloaded paper. Thank you for helping and thank you for sharing it with so many people.

I am currently working with the collaborators of the first paper, along with an expanded set of top notch new collaborators on the second and third paper. These will go much deeper into the issues of metabolism, Calorie, and assorted myths that we (yes, me too) have propagated during our quest to be the most obese human generation of all time.

Of course it can be said in a simple summary: “protein, carbohydrate, and fat” – speak doesn’t tell you much and you can’t out-exercise your mouth.

Today of course, one would believe weight loss and health requires a degree in molecular biology, but I can assure you that there are millions of words propagated in thousands of blogs by people repeating, not measuring. I don’t intend on wasting your bandwidth here and that requires a not-so-profitable diligence to do science first and promote second. For this I appreciate your patience and support.

But it is FALL!

At least in the northern hemisphere and that means mild cold stress season. Let’s take a few minutes to talk about some great papers that published in the last few months and some practical tips for easing into metabolic winter and getting the most out of it. Rather than plunging into shivering water or eating buckets of ice, it’s more important to focus on achieving mild exposure over longer durations. As the summer ends, we are warm adapted and we have an exaggerated response to cooler temperatures. 65F/18C might very well seem cool in the middle of the summer, but in the middle of the winter coming in from a ski run that same temperature is comfortable and warm. I explain more in Ch-Ch-Changes (you need to be a registered user to see archives – it’s free and I don’t send you junk mail to buy stuff).

The take home summary here is that we don’t really sense/judge absolute temperature very well and we can become accustomed to a warmer/cooler environment without much effort; this isn’t akin training for a marathon. One IDEAL way to become more accustomed to the warm-cool “shock” and acclimate is through contrast showers. I highly recommend these to everyone getting started. Check out Mitochondrial Anarchy for details on why, but I’ve included the photo here if you just want to jump right in.

As we explain in Metabolic Winter Hypothesis, there seems to be a strong interdependence with mild cold stress, caloric restriction, and sleep. These not only impact higher level interaction like found in the HPT-Axis, but also seem to play a strong role at the cellular biogenesis level. It seems that our circadian clocks are intertwined with both the season and energy management. That’s not a surprising idea, but we currently seem to be one seasoned in our approach to health: bright, active, and warm. For example, it’s well known that Seasonal Affective Disorder may be addressed by bright light therapy (thinkla spring/metabolic summer) and yet widely unknown that cold stress can have similar results. The question one then brings up: is it too little light or too much warmth that is causing the problem? No one can answer for certain, but our “fear of cold” learned response is to reach for the bright, happy light. We do the same thing with the “fear of hunger” and sugar, salt and fat.

Not everything we crave is necessarily what we “need.” Alcoholics and heroin addicts are just two examples of this change from have to have not that inserts a craving that is neither healthy or natural. We see it’s the sudden change that seems to rock the boat and contrast showers are one way to not only mute your response to that change, but further to begin an easy, comfortable adaptation to the lower temperatures ahead.

Una Siesta Fresca

We discussed in Beauty Sleep the wonderful advantages of cool sleep and some scientists at National Institutes of Health (NIH) , National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases have beautifully demonstrated this in a recent study. Impact of Chronic Cold Exposure in Humans (ICEMAN) is a bit misleading (everyone wants to make it sound extreme), looked at 5 men ranging in age from 19-23 and looked at metabolic response. Over a 4 month period they were subjected to sleeping in rooms that varied from 66°F (19°C) and 81°F (27°C). Daytime activities were normal. BAT and metabolism was measured at the end of each month and researchers concluded that the warm, 81°F (27°C), suppressed BAT and metabolic activity, while the mild cold 66°F (19°C) increased the men’s BAT and metabolic rates.

Figure 1 Map showing the 100 clusters included in the study grouped according to their mean annual temperature. from S. Valde

A second study that I haven’t seen reported much was conducted by researchers in Spain. They found, after adjusting for lifestyle (physical activity, Mediterranean diet score, smoking) and socio-demographic (age, gender, educational level, marital status) that a clear association in obesity with mean annual temperature existed. The first question many ask me when I discuss my research is, “well, why aren’t people fat in that live in cold climates?” I typically respond, because we avoid the cold by layering and ubiquitous warm shelter and transportation. What is interesting about this study is that it’s somewhat a homogeneous culture and diet and the temperature range is 10.4-21.9C (50.7-71.4F). This is a perfect span of mild cold stress – reinforcing the point I always make here (and yet the media NEVER quotes me correct on) extreme is not necessary. Cool, not cold is the best approach. This was a final sample size of 5061 men/women and there is clearly a significant trend.

From the warmest to the coolest quartile, obesity prevalence rose from 26.9% (Q1)…30.5% (Q2)…32% (Q3)…33% (Q4). I think these both underscore the power of mild cold stress and also reinforce the metabolic winter hypothesis. I doesn’t take much over a long time to make a huge difference. As well, lipids are likely prefered in non shivering thermogenesis over glucose, conserving precious glucose to fuel red blood cells (they have no mitochondria and can’t metabolize lipids or ketones). If you ever see my name associated with an article or quoted in one that discuss crazy cold stuff, please know right then that I told the journalist, perhaps pleaded with them, to not make this article about extreme. They rarely listen, but just know I NEVER have a conversation with one that I don’t emphasize that point.

Gloves before sweater makes you look better – cover your symptoms of cold (nose, face, ears, feet, and hands) first and carry layers with you. Layer as needed and don’t layer and remove. Use caution in long duration exposures and don’t fool with water temperatures below 60F (15.5C) or air 32F (0C). Be safe as you can have a big impact without resorting to epic extreme.

Open Source Body

Besides writing, one of my main activities the last couple of months was setting up a non-profit 501(c)3 foundation to fund continued research. Having selected a founding board and kicked it off with an initial investment, it’s underway. We’re working on setting up a website and establishing a working relationship with several other organizations. We have the founding board in place and are actively seeking our science advisory board.

Our Mission is simple:

With worldwide pandemics of chronic disease and obesity, Open Source Body is a network created to facilitate the collaborative research that might halt or reverse this trend. All data submitted or research paid for by OpenSourceBody.org will be available for public access.

The mission of Open Source Body is to extend the successful open source efforts that fueled the internet revolution to areas of health, fitness and nutrition. We operate under the simple principle that good health can be found in every body.™

I am encouraged by the participation and support you have given me and I think this can be scaled. The internet is loaded with blogs that preach health under a never ending drum beat of selling supplements, plans, and you name it. I’m certainly not against anyone making a living, but it doesn’t play well when they turn out to be wrong and have an entire business built on a house of cards. That ends up in senseless attacks or bullying and really, I don’t want to participate in this sort of fiasco. We only learn when we are wrong – every good scientist understands this. What I seem to encounter more often than not on blogs are people with science backgrounds that just repeat, repeat, repeat. The story is now down to such a reductionist level that one needs a degree in molecular biology to keep up or go grocery shopping. It appears to be a never ending contradiction to the public. This ever increasing techno talk bodes well as people end up being easily bamboozled with techno-talk.

Carl Sagan had this to say:

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”

So rather than rant more about this, I want to do something proactive to make a difference and my first self test is under way. I’m trying not to be tricked and I know the human brain, more importantly my brain, is biased to patterns. It’s tough to escape it, but with good measurement it is possible. About a year ago you might remember I did a small, 6 week self test and it was an incredible success with some unexpected outcomes. Knowing I didn’t have enough data to fully capture what was going on, I decided to repeat it and up the ante a bit. I have a team of researchers that helped me design and carry out this test and it’s been pretty damn exciting.

To start, I gained (0ver 3 months) 15 lbs and held that weight for over 2 months before I began. I have been weight stable for nearly 6 years outside of the couple of short experiments I did over a year ago. That stable weight was about 20 lbs above my ideal weight. The goal was simple: track it all and lose 30 lbs in 6 weeks without exercise or supplements and test some of the fundamental notions of the “nutritional emergency/deficiency” everyone seems to bellow on about in an endless onslaught of advertisements.

I began the Phase 3 on November 8, coincidentally my 50th birthday, and as of today I haven’t eaten for 11 days. Over the weekend, we did full amino acid profiles every 4 hours over 24 hours. I look like a junkie with track marks in both arms and both hands. It required me to pack my lab and drive 2400 miles to California. I’ve measured my metabolism daily throughout this 6-week test and despite losing 30.3 lbs already and not EATING for 11 days, my body is not going into “starvation mode” >gasp<, which is oft reported by fitness, blogs, and media (and researchers, physicians and dietitians). I suspect most that proclaim these metabolic doomsday have likely never measured a single metabolism in their lives; they might not even know a person that has. Am I a genetic freak? I’m not betting on it as my data matches almost identically the results of the great scientists of the 19th century that studied this subject back when this was actually cutting edge research.

There are too many repeaters.

Today I decided to plot some data, after all I have to do is take needles and drink water and how much of that can one take? I exceeded my goal of 30 lbs today with 3 days of water left, but it’s pretty exciting to share this with my blog followers. If you are new to the blog, I highly recommend you stop now and go back to the Muscling Your Metabolism posts and work your way though. Once again, it’s respiratory quotient that everyone leaves out of the “broken metabolism” drama that is key to understanding what is happening.

Take a look at the graphs. You see my weight loss (A) is is pretty constant and of course if one just goes by the RMR of the Harris-Benedict equation (B), it predicts a declining metabolism. Remember, metabolism scales with MASS not lean mass. The bigger you are, the more calories you’ll burn. It’s similar to the riddle, which weighs more, a ton of feathers or a ton of bricks? Likewise, whether you lug around an extra 30, 50 or 100 lbs of fat or steel all day long, it’s going to amp up metabolism. More on this in our next paper.

Okay, this is where the FUN begins. As you can see (C) my BMR does drop over the first 8 days or so. Can this be the dreaded “starvation mode” that we are warned about? Will it crash to zero and cause me to balloon back to 230 lbs? What if I skip breakfast???? There is an ever so slight downward trend of BMR as you see in the linear curve fit, but as I have have often warned, the magnitude of metabolism is almost irrelevant. Think of it like a business. What do annual sales tell us about the health of a company? Not much. They could be making $100 million a year and losing $25 million a year in a slow (fast) bleed. We need to see the balance sheet. Tell me about net income or EBITDA.

The same is true with metabolism and we need to know how the metabolism is partitioned between carbohydrate or fat so take a look (D). Clearly my FAT metabolism is not staying level, in fact it’s zooming up. That’s because starvation mode is BURNING OUR RESERVES. How simple can this be? I mean, why do we have fat anyway if not to burn it in times of caloric scarcity. As we point out in Metabolic Winter Hypothesis, that used to be an annual stressor. Now, winter never comes. We need to stop making things so difficult.

More Work To Do

I’m so excited by the results and it’s been an incredible journey and learning experience. There’s a lot more, but I wanted to share that with our community now and ask for your help. I am raising $15,000 to help defer the costs of the testing and travel associated with this test. As well I’d like to begin the Open Source Body website development and design. I am done self testing (at least for weight loss) as I intend on staying within my ideal weight from this point forward. I’ll finally put exercise back into my regular activity and continue to work with mild cold stress and calorie restriction to help define ways more people can practically adopt it into their lifestyle.

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 5 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 – have to be well hydrated for that massive amount of blood to be drawn tomorrow morning.

Thanks!
Ray

References

Lee, Paul, et al. “Temperature-acclimated brown adipose tissue modulates insulin sensitivity in humans.” Diabetes (2014): DB_140513.

Valdés, Sergio, et al. “Ambient temperature and prevalence of obesity in the Spanish population. Di@ bet. es study.” Obesity (2014).

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.

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