Thermogenex - Fuel the Burn

Currently viewing the tag: "metabolism"

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.

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).

The Metabolic Winter Hypothesis

By admin On May 13, 2014 · 43 Comments

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

This blog really started, because Tim Ferriss insisted I put “something” up before our 4 Hour Body Nightline segment aired in late 2010. I had no idea what direction my research would take at that point and certainly no idea how this blog would unfold. But make no mistake, I’ve had wrong ideas about the world

I’ve unintentionally held these wrong ideas throughout my science career. Sometime it’s due to lack of data, the inability to see the picture clearly, which causes one to make a (wrong) educated best-guess. Many times it’s simply a key element of information that is missing or present that skews opinion one side or the other of “correct.” More often than I care to admit, it’s because I blindly accepted something I read (ironically, just like you and this blog) and either didn’t care to verify what was said or I simply didn’t have the requisite background to see through the “trickery.” Sometimes we are fooled, not merely by another author’s ignorance, but intentionally.

That’s not the spirit of science. The goal is to learn and of course we only learn when we are wrong about an idea. Simply repeating what we know isn’t learning – our view about the world must change to learn and hence those that haven’t given this any careful consideration might say, “these scientists, they are always conflicting, this week one thing, next week something else.”

Exactly. That is THE point. When our ideas conflict with what is observed in the universe, it’s not the universe that needs to be fixed.

The Emotion of Science

Recently a major milestone occurred with the collection of evidence that supports cosmic inflation theory. A moment that’s repeated throughout time – a scientist’s ideas verified – was captured in this incredible video as Assistant Professor Chao-Lin Kuo surprises Dr. Linde at his home:

Did you get that?

“I always live with this feeling, what if I’m tricked? What if I believe into this just because it is beautiful…”

If you aren’t in science, this video portrays an emotion you might not be aware exists. Not to imply scientists are objective robots or blind to emotional trickery, but that what must be overcome is the human urge to find that beauty or pattern. Before we push send, publish, or make the call, all good scientists have that queasy feeling and few put it into such eloquent and simple words as Dr Linde has here. That’s a different kind of beauty and it happened quite automatically in this extemporaneous interview.

Trying to chip away and find a nugget a truth in a noisy world is what drives many and while information is more plentiful than ever, blogs have unintentionally added even more noise and created extra layers of difficulty. Who do we believe?

What if I’m Tricked

Two weeks ago one of several journal articles I’ve been working on was accepted. It’s finished peer review and I will update when it it publishes. Later in this blog you can help by donating to the Open Access Fee for the journal. When I began my journey 5 years ago, I wasn’t doing a science project or an N = 1 trial. The goal wasn’t why I lose weight it was to simply lose it. Soon thereafter, I was confronted with health issues that didn’t go away with the weight loss as surmised and that started me on yet another, parallel journey.

When Tim Ferriss asked if he could tell my story, I consented having no idea the magnitude of that agreement. I had data only because that’s what I do by habit, not because I was trying to “prove” something. As soon as one makes a claim that is unconventional, the “truth” police come out and one finds their ideas attacked. Much of it was nonsense that didn’t really deserve the rebuttal, but there was some honest criticism that was certainly welcome.

It necessitated digging in even further to demonstrate an idea I thought to be a simplistic and self-evident truth. Is it “out there” to suggest that it take more energy to maintain constant body temperature in a cooler environment? I think most people reacted to this innate phobia of cold and it didn’t help that some wanted to summarize it as the “ice cube diet.” Either way, I needed good data – what if I’m tricked? In looking at the overall thermodynamics, mild cold stress was certainly important, but the thermodynamics of food was absolutely key.

There are a lot of smart people being “tricked.” Thermodynamics is relatively sound and accountable – if one establishes the boundary conditions. My confidence was not born out of hubris, but because I had some of the greatest minds on my team. Richard Feynman said it best,

“There is a fact, or if you wish, a law, governing natural phenomena that are known to date. There is no known exception to this law; it is exact, so far we know The law is called conservation of energy; it states that there is a certain quantity, which we call energy, that does not change in manifold changes which nature undergoes. That is a most abstract idea, because it is a mathematical principle; it says that there is a numerical quantity, which does not change when something happens. It is not a description of a mechanism, or anything concrete; it is just a strange fact that we can calculate some number, and when we finish watching nature go through her tricks and calculate the number again, it is the same.”

Our problem is understanding “nature and her tricks.” When our ideas don’t conform to the universe, it’s our ideas that need reformed. Some might make the absurd claim that obesity is proof that the conservation of energy is wrong. I’m betting the error happens when we “calculate some number.”

Fast forward to the review article that is about to publish. In it, we make an argument for a metabolic winter hypothesis. My collaborators are two esteemed researchers. I am not saying this for an empty “appeal to authority argument” (attack logic flaws when one doesn’t have their own data is the vogue approach taken on many blogs these days), but out of genuine respect for both of them.

Dr. Andrew Bremer was at Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital serving as a pediatric endocrinologist and professor of medicine at Vanderbilt Medical School when we met. Last November, he was tapped by the National Institutes of Health to become the Director for Type 2 Diabetes Prevention and Treatment Research and Digestive and Kidney Diseases Medical Officer. Many of you know his work already if not by name, as he’s a co-author and first author on many of the fructose/endocrinology articles by Robert Lustig. He’s a PhD/MD and his publication record is phenomenal.

When I began describing some alternate explanations for the etiology of metabolic syndrome and obesity, he listened and ultimately it changed his perspective. He too, is not beyond being “tricked.” He’s also an incredible mentor and researcher and I’ve learned so much from him in the process. He was able to put aside things he was taught in medical and graduate school to explore new ideas. We now have a lifetime of future work to do after securing funding. When we originally met during one of my children’s office visits, I had no idea who he was and he asked me if I’d mind reading a paper he’d recently published. Later that evening I was shocked to read it and a week later got the nerve to ask him about potential collaboration on my project.

My second co-author, Dr. David Sinclair, is at Department of Genetics Harvard Medical School and Department of Pharmacology School of Medical Sciences, The University of New South Wales, Australia. He’s one of the world authorities on longevity, in fact voted Time Magazine’s Top 100 Most Influential People a few weeks ago. He’s probably one of the people most responsible for the last few years of my exhaustive research. He is also an incredibly well-published author and most recently his paper in Dec 2013 Cell on NAD/HIF-1α has taken another critical step towards untangling the web of aging.

Like Andrew Bremer, I had no idea who David Sinclair was when standing in line the first day of TEDMED 2009. He overheard me talking to another person in line and joined in the conversation. He was very certain that mild cold stress had more application than just weight loss and really encouraged me to think very differently about the problem. Later, when he got up on the TEDMED stage for his talk, I was shocked by just how much of an authority on the subject he was. The entire TEDMED experience granted me the opportunity to brainstorm with top scientists – people I certainly would have never had access to without this event.

We continued our conversations and even picked them up the years following and he kept encouraging me to push. There was, and still is, so much I don’t know about longevity, but he’s on top of it and it is a huge advantage to have someone like this on a collaborative team.

Together, we were able to create a fantastic multi-disciplinary team to tackle this first review and others are in preparation. Unfortunately I was drinking from a firehose and it took many hours to digest the several thousand papers, couple hundred textbooks, and do my own self experiments in the lab. These guys are way ahead of me and still are on so many facets of our research. The blog wasn’t the top priority. I apologize for the absence, but it’s important to have an influence on the other publication machine that pushes all ideas forward as well.

Confidence in Nonsense

So this brings up the question we need to all ask ourselves about the things we repeat every day.

How do I know?

I ask myself this question all the time. Who did it come from and how do they know? Science investigation and curiosity has permeated my entire adult life and I think that begins with the natural curiosity of all children. I guess I just didn’t grow up. I’ve had the privilege to work with some of the most innovative, bright minds in the world. It’s help me to develop an arsenal of tools and disruptively innovate in many different industries. Attending various scientific gatherings allows me to work with others that disrupt and that moves everything forward. It also keeps me honest, people are quick to point out when I’m being tricked.

Konrad Dannenberg (original German Rocket Scientist) talks with Burt Rutan the morning after the successful SpaceShipOne first launch. I took Konrad to the launch that year. My all time favorite picture of two heros.

One of my mentors in creativity, Aerospace Maverick Burt Rutan, says, “you have to have confidence in nonsense If you want to innovate.” Rutan is arguably one of the most innovative aeronautical engineers of the past 50 years. Rutan adds, “an innovation is by definition something that half of the people think is impossible, and half say, well, maybe it can be done.”

Rutan knows innovation—he was the first to fly around the world nonstop without refueling. He was first to launch a privately funded spaceship, winning the $10 million Ansari X Prize. He joined forces with billionaire entrepreneur Richard Branson to build the first private suborbital spaceship for Virgin Galactic’s launch into space tourism. His very success in all these projects was a result of breaking all the rules and letting his goals define his approach. How else does one come up with an airplane design as unconventional as the Boomerang.

Aviation has certainly advanced over the years. Let’s focus our attention on the year 1894. Two significant, separate innovative events occurred – 120 years ago. Karl Benz introduced the Velo, becoming the first production automobile and that very same year Wilbur Olin Atwater published the USDA’s first Bulletin on the Nutritive Value of Food.

What has happened in the intervening Century in Food Science versus Transportation? On the transpiration front we blew past trains, automobiles, airplanes, sound barrier and spaceships! Space is on the verge of privatization – companies I co-founded in the 90s have flow over 10,000 people in weightlessness (gozerog.com) and 7 people to Space Station (Space Adventures); one flew twice! Humankind has walked on the moon and sent probes to other planets and even out of our solar system! We’ve made huge progress on the shoulders of visionary, disruptive innovators. Today, the entire U.S. access to space rests on the work of PayPal founder, Elon Musk, and his company Space-X.

Now consider how much progress have we made in nutritional health as it relates to food science since the 1894 with introduction first USDA nutritional guidelines? Not very much. Our nutritionally driven chronic diseases have become MUCH worse. Having now researched metabolism and nutrition reaching all the way back to Hippocrates (460-377 BC), I can certainly say that any one of the 19th century great nutrition researchers, Atwater, Rubner, von Voit, etc… would readily recognize and not be too terribly surprised by a modern day diet book. We are still obsessed with juggling mythical ratio of “proteins, carbohydrates, and fats” something I would argue is a somewhat irrelevant and certainly a dated way to look at food. We simply heap lots of multi-syllable organic chemistry, endocrinology, and molecular biology words onto these antiquated and overly simplistic organization of foods. It’s like strapping explosives onto a Velo with the idea that will take us to Mars.

What do you think Mr. Benz reaction would be sitting in a Mercedes SLS AMG GT as compared to a Benz Velo? I’m certain that Lavoisier would be impressed with the simplicity of running a calorimetry experiment in my lab – vous appuyez sur le bouton? Mais, c’est incroyable! But the data we collected would not differ significantly from what he knew to be true as I describe in Muscling Your Metabolism (part 1). How do I know? because I repeated it and generated numbers that were very close.

I am not suggesting we’ve made no progress in molecular biology, genetics, or physiology, but our ability to treat chronic disease through nutrition or public information about food is an utter failure. The average walking around advice for diet and exercise is broken and most diet books are written by people that couldn’t possibly have measured many metabolisms. Most importantly our relationship with food is broken. Nutritionism is broken. Worse yet are the industry authorities and blogs that repeat unsubstantiated “facts” over and over again – insanity through inundation. I was guilty of the same thing not too long ago, but for the last 4 years, I haven’t taken anything at face value.

A Good Skeptic

In areas of food and metabolism we are inundated by an inordinate amount of untested hypotheses and anecdotal evidence. To be sure, the diet and fitness industry is loaded with R&D (rip off and duplicate), but where are the people with what Rutan calls “confidence in nonsense?” Does anyone else notice the sheer-volume of myths and urban legend that permeate every level of our daily discussion of food and nutrition?

I am not alone in this opinion.

In the January 31, 2013 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine article, Myths, Presumptions, and Facts about Obesity, the authors had this to say:

“Why do we think or claim we know things that we actually do not know? Numerous cognitive biases lead to an unintentional retention of erroneous beliefs. When media coverage about obesity is extensive, many people appear to believe some myths (e.g., rapid weight loss facilitates weight regain) simply because of repeated exposure to the claims.

Cognitive dissonance may prevent us from abandoning ideas that are important to us, despite contradictory evidence (e.g., the idea that breast-feeding prevents obesity in children). Similarly, confirmation bias may prevent us from seeking data that might refute propositions we have already intuitively accepted as true because they seem obvious (e.g., the value of realistic weight loss goals). Moreover, we may be swayed by persuasive yet fallacious arguments (Whately provides a classic catalogue) unless we are prepared to identify them as spurious.”

Wilbur Atwater’s notebooks from the late 19th century and my Moleskine as I poured through archives of his work. Incredible to look through them knowing how the story ends.

This pretty much sums up my existence and excitement over the last 5 years. It is amazing to be able to walk out of my kitchen and into a lab to test dogma, spend days reading historic old textbooks, and visit locations where past and present ideas about our bodies and nutrition were born.

I decided not to take anyone’s opinion for granted and invested in my own laboratory. I have what you might call a scientist’s mid life crisis indirect calorimeter instead of a sports car. It’s allowed me to carryout experiments in an attempt to separate fact from fiction. We all need to be a little more skeptical, but at the end of the day the truth is in what is demonstrable and repeatable.

Much like the words protein, carbohydrate and fat, metabolism is another word that’s bandied around and in some sense has become meaningless. Do we all have slow metabolism? Does muscle burn more than fat and by how much? What happens to our metabolism if we skip meals? I have tried to answer some of these questions in previous posts and more informations is coming. It’s my hope to help people see through the inundated insanity.

An Incredible Opportunity

I think many people overlook one of the best points in The 4 Hour Body. You can dismiss the individual ideas, or even dismiss the author, but there is one part about the book that rarely get’s highlighted and can’t be dismissed, the Appendix. So many love to read “freeze your ass off” sensationalism into the chapter on my work or imagine themselves as the modern day version of Woody Allen’s Ograsmatron, but I say dig in on pages 484-510 if you want to see what motivates me on a daily basis. That is the meat of the book (cruciferous vegetables didn’t have the same ring) and that is why I agreed to allow my work to be featured. Tim does understand the world of self-experimentation.

It doesn’t matter if he is right or wrong about any of the chapters as long as he’s pushing the envelope, measuring, and aggregating data. I think his “confidence in nonsense” is a good contrast to a century of metabolic stagnation. If you want to see a glimpse at just how powerful this idea self experimentation can be, watch this TEDMED presentation by Jamie Heywood:

We are sitting on an unprecedented opportunity – the aggregation of N of 1 data that eclipses the expensive and slow clinical trials that now dominate science. These are necessary and will still go on, but I can’t imagine there’s much “confidence in nonsense” taking place in most funded proposals today. Conservative claims and reach has become the mainstay of academia. Science isn’t halted and we still have plenty of risk takers, but the preponderance of funding is placed on incremental progress. You have the opportunity to collect data – technology has never been more accessible. We have the opportunity to ferret out what’s right and wrong, and avoid focus on who.

Let’s all be more skeptical and open minded. They aren’t mutually exclusive efforts.

Copies of Our Paper

One final request. The open access fee for the journal, allowing anyone to download it without charge, is $3200. I know many of you contribute monthly to the blog and I very much appreciate it. I am asking that you make a one time donation to help me defer that cost of 0pen access publication. Most don’t donate, so this is one of those few times I’ll ask you to think bigger.

If the fancy button doesn’t work, try this old-fashion hyperlink.

I will make sure to update everyone when it is available for download and if I can raise the Open Access fees, everyone will be able to access it. This is just the foundation and I have conducted a lot of experiments in my lab that aren’t directly publishable, but give us a good idea of what to look at in future clinical trials and proposals.

After this series of review articles has made it through the peer review process, I’ll likely publish the book I’ve been researching for a couple of years. The notes and references are all in place as is the table of context and many chapters. In the summer I will be announcing a crowd-sourced fund for another set of self-experiments I intend to do in late August and will need to raise money to cover the extensive cost of lab work and extended travel time in the NYC/Boston area near my science collaborators. This is all directly related to surprising things I learned last summer in my own lab. I’m sorry again about the delay in sharing results, but so many things get duplicated (unattributed) these days that I really need to get the publications in first and that process is unfortunately slow.

I hope everyone understands.

I have the outline for another summary blog that goes over the many related publications that have come out in the last couple of months that support The Metabolic Winter Hypothesis and will put it up when the paper is released.

As always, thanks for your support, ideas, questions and participation.

Ray

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.

**************

Do you like these blogs and want to help me? Please take a minute to scroll up on the right side of the screen to consider making a monthly donation to this program. You can also make a one time donation here:

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 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.

**************
Do you like these blogs and want to help me? Please take a minute to scroll up on the right side of the screen to consider making a monthly donation to this program. You can also make a one time donation here:

Muscling Your Metabolism (Part 1)

By admin On December 29, 2012 · 133 Comments

As I sat on my back porch early one morning in October, 2008, there was no way for me to realize how this one crazy moment would completely change my life. Over the weekend, I attended a meeting in Philadelphia and on the last night proclaimed to a friend that I was about to do the most odd experiment in my life. I wanted to get to the bottom of “metabolism” and “burning calories.” I wanted to understand why it seemed so difficult to lose a couple of pounds and yet I could easily GAIN a couple in a weekend.

So on the first day of this self experiment, I was sitting in shorts with no shoes, shirt, or hat. I wondered what was it like to be cold? I wanted to see how far I could go. That morning it was 33F/0.5C and the following week (an unseasonable chill for the area) it ranged from 32F/0C-41F/5C. So many things about all of this were fortuitous and not planned. My goal was simple question:

Why do I get cold and what causes me to reach the point where I must seek warmth?

For the first time in my life, I was shivering uncontrollably. I don’t think I’d ever REALLY shivered before. I started writing down symptoms and sensations. I remember at one point my already illegible scribble in my notebook becoming even more unrecognizable and I put the notebook and pen down. Closing my eyes I could feel pain in my feet and hands. My ears, nose and face burned and shivering got a little more aggressive. At first, I could close my eyes and will my shivering away for 10-20 seconds. At some point that no longer worked. My scalp tighten and I felt all the blood struggling to stay in my limbs.

I can’t remember if it was my ears, feet, hand, or face that finally made me call it quits, but I do remember walking in on very numb feet, barely able to open the door and deciding a warm shower was in order. Even as my hand went under the first cold water that came out of the shower head, it was burning warm. The shower faucet was the type that had the temperature preset and there was no WAY I was taking a shower at the normally adjusted temperature – it was entirely too hot. These perceptions of change are something we are all too fast to forget; There are a range of environments we can survive and our body doesn’t sense absolutes, but is driven by change.

What I’ve learned since makes me look back and laugh a bit at how extreme I perceived that morning to be, but not because I didn’t really experience the agony. This isn’t just a melodramatic, reminiscent account – it happened as severely as I remember it. What I have learned is just how adaptable the Human body is to the world around us. As machines go we are INCREDIBLY adaptable. Our simple, one-dimensional explanations of what we might in one moment experience or perceive are often skewed from what we are really capable of doing.

I was just as wrong about my ideas of metabolism back then and I would argue that many physicians, nutritionists, and fitness experts fall into the same trap. What sets me apart now is that I am measuring metabolism weekly in range of conditions and people and it’s opened up my eyes to an entirely new world.

The Beginning

I’ve been reading/collecting/studying physiology, nutrition, and metabolism textbooks from the late 18th century to the early 19th century. The work that was completed during this period is spectacular. What began with the Enlightenment and persisted through the Industrial Revolution was a very profound shift in how we viewed our bodies. Although there had been exploration of what we now calle metabolism going all the way back to Hippocrates (460 BC-370 BC), the progress we made during this ~125 years was simply astounding.

It’s important as one reads these classic papers and textbooks to somewhat immerse in their world. It’s easy to see the debate of the time and it’s interesting to look back with the same clarity that I now reflect on my first cold experiment, and know who’s right and who’s wrong. When we look back 100 years from now, what do you think we’ll find? We didn’t drink enough sodas or protein shakes? We didn’t take enough supplements? Where do we get our “protein” anyway? Was everyone allergic to wheat gluten?

Whether it’s the work of Becher, Lavoisier, or Atwater, there are so many hypotheses we know to be true today, but were highly debated when introduced. Yet, curiosity and perseverance caused these free-thinkers to press forward and conduct experiments and collect supporting data. They challenged status quo and it didn’t always make them popular.

For example, nearly a century past with the world’s greatest scientists all knowing that the reason things burned was due to the “phlogiston” contained within the substance.(1) These “phlogisticated” substances were “dephlogisticated” when burned. The air only had a limited amount of phlogiston it could absorb. Whether it was a candle or a Guinea pig in a sealed container, soon the air was no longer capable of absorbing any more phlogiston and the life, like the candle, was extinguished. We now understatnd from the work of Lavoisier that it was the oxygen in the air that diminished, but for a century, the best scientists in the world followed the phlogistic doctrine.

It interesting that nearly 200 years later, Lavoisier had it correct in his November 19, 1790 letter to Dr Joseph Black at the University of Edinburgh when he writes:

La quantité d’air vital ou gaz oxigène qu’un homme en repos et à jeun consomme, ou plutôt convertit en air fixe ou acide carbonique, pendant une heure est de 1200 pouces cubiques de France environ, quand il est placé dans une température de 26 degrés.

Cette quantité s’élève à 1400 pouces, dans les mêmes circonstances, si la personne est placée dans une température de 12 degrés seulement.

La quantité de gaz oxigène consommée, ou convertie en acide carbonique, augmente pendant le tems de la digestion et s’élève à 1800 ou 1900 pouces.

Par le mouvement et l’exercice on la porte jusqu’à 4000 pouces par heure et même davantage…”

The quantity of vital air or oxygen gas that a man at rest and fasting consumes, or rather converts into fixed air or carbonic acid for an hour, is 1200 cubic French inches when it is placed in a temperature of 26 degrees.
This amount increases to 1400 inches in the same circumstances, if the person is placed in a temperature of 12 degrees only.
The amount of oxygen gas consumed or converted into carbonic acid increases during the time of digestion and amounts to 1800 or 1900 inches.
By movement and exercise, the amount is increased up to 4000 inches per hour and even more.

Nutrition. Exercise. Thermal Load. There it is before we even fully agreed on the existence of Oxygen. It might be interesting to note that Lavoisier did this work in his home laboratory and invited scientists from around the world to come work with his equipment. I like that kind of career and I can completely identify with the inner passion.

This was one of a series of letters written to Dr Black in late 1790 to convince him that the phlogistic doctrine represented good observations, but was fundamentally wrong explanation at the same time. Dr Black, a stauch advocate of the phlogistic doctrine, replied a two months later not with disdain, but with gracious respect:

…Having been accustomed, for thirty years, to believe and to teach the phlogistic doctrine , as it was understood before the development of your system, I, for a long time, experienced extreme repugnance to the new system, which represented, as absurdity, that which I had hitherto regarded as sound doctrine Nevertheless, that repugnance, which proceeded entirely from the force of habit, hath gradually diminished, overcome by the clearness of your demonstrations, and solidity of your plan. Although there are some particular facts , the explications of which appears to be difficult; I am convinced, that yours is much better founded than the ancient doctrine…

He goes on to write,

…But if the power of habit prevents some among the older chemists from appreciating your ideas, the young students, who are not influenced by the same power, range themselves universally on your side…

This is how science is ever growing and changes, but these sorts of exchanges can now happen happen in milliseconds in email and instead of published letters (Lavoisier’s letters to Dr. Black were not publicly published until the late 1800s). Lavoisier, unfortunately was guillotined just three years later at the age of 50 for his participation in the Ferme générale, an outsourced tax collection service to the king [Note to self: stick with paypal donations]. It was a huge loss and we’ll never know where Lavoisier’s work could really have ended.

The Raging Fire

What strikes me about the totality of this research is the amount of time and widespread acceptance of the simple notion that man kept warm by expending caloric energy. I’ve had more than one debate with those that should know better, but don’t seem to see the importance of this shift in our daily living environment. Of course keeping warm was an obvious part of life 200 years ago, but we’ve not learned much new to discount it’s importance in the daily balance.

Despite all that, there’s a lot more attention now and more and more people are becoming with both the idea and how it can be used. We have discussed the idea surrounding brown Adipose Tissue (BAT) on several blog posts, and it’s quite the rage in the media, but I want to go back to the BATgirl (Part 2) post.

In it we talked about the implications of not having any BAT at all. We’ve also discussed the idea of exercise induced hormone, Irisin, for potentially creating new BAT, but are there other options? While it certainly can be advantageous to create or have BAT, can anyone, regardless of BAT levels, take advantage of 1) your ability to comfortably adapt to a wider range of cooler temperatures than you might otherwise expect and 2) what mechanisms might be in play when BAT’s not cause for warmth?

Remember, the way BAT causes the heat is through mitochondrial uncoupling – i.e. the cells power plant is encouraged to directly produce waste HEAT instead of ATP for cellular energy. Since every cell has a mitochondrion for biogenesis, can mitochondrion in cells other than BAT be recruited to the causes?

There are two excellent papers I want to share. The first is about skeletal muscle mitochondrial uncoupling from Maastricht University, The Netherlands. (2) I will talk more about respiration calorimetry on the next post, but this study involved measuring the metabolic response in 10 lean men for both a warm (22C) and cool (16 C) environment.

Human Skeletal Muscle Mitochondrial Uncoupling Is Associated with Cold Induced Adaptive Thermogenesis

(1) James Bryan Conant, ed. The Overthrow of Phlogiston Theory: The Chemical Revolution of 1775–1789. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, (1950)

(2) Wijers SLJ, Schrauwen P, Saris WHM, van Marken Lichtenbelt WD. Human skeletal muscle mitochondrial uncoupling is associated with cold induced adaptive thermogenesis. PLoS ONE 2008;3:e1777-e1777

Beauty Sleep

By admin On October 17, 2012 · 79 Comments

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 example: remove all of the fiber and other less digestible material to create highly concentrated forms of energy and one ends up with a whole host of metabolic interruptions. The same goes for fat – be it olive oil or lard. I will come back to this in much more detail in the future. Protein, the seemingly magic cure all for everything, is no different. The same is true for alcohol – the forth energy source, although most people have a reasonably good handle on at least this one macronutrient or know when it’s being taken in excess.

If we could somehow magically apply the obvious “truths” and perceptions about the macronutrient, alcohol, to the other three, we’d all be a lot closer to the how the body works. Children are now getting non alcoholic fatty liver disease in record numbers – a disease of mostly alcoholics for decades. For now, stop defining food in terms of “protein carbs and fat;” despite the wide spread use, this will only serve to complicate your choices and you’ll inevitably make a wrong decision. Reductionist thinking about macronutrients is THE problem we face today having mastered acute medical care and the battle ahead is clearly with chronic over-nutrition.

Orbital Mechanics of Sleep

It’s now Fall in the northern hemisphere and so let’s turn back to cold stress and look at how the seasons play into our biology. Certainly everyone should feel confident in the idea that day/light matters. When you skip a few time zones over, it’s impossible to just will oneself to immediately adapt. At NASA, we’d sleep shift a week or two before to avoid the 4 am crash when we worked night shifts for SpaceLab missions. Light and dark signals the body to do different things. While our body is certainly tied to the Earth’s rotation, it’s also tied to the seasons.

Because the Earth spins tilted on it’s axis, there is a difference in light reaching the Earth’s surface at different points of the orbital year. This of course results in the opposite seasons for Northern and Southern hemisphere. The Days get longer and shorter in summer and winter, respectively, and all biology responds in some degree to this seasonal variability.

Humans are not immune.

Seasonal variation matters to all biology on Earth. Anyone willing to take the bet that Humans have been so smart, we engineered seasonal variability out of our life in say, 100 years? We often are lead to believe we rule the Earth, but a tornado, hurricane or volcano can squash that delusion in an instant. Our biology is connected – I’m not one for mystical energies, but I also can’t explain sleep or details of monarch butterfly migration. Something is going on that’s doesn’t seem to care about what iCal/Outlook has in store.

Aww, Nuts. Not Peanuts AGAIN?

Thermal loading can be enhanced by proper food.

Give me the nuts or the iPad is Toast.

I have a squirrel in my backyard (along with lots of other wildlife) and over the last few years, I’ve spent a lot of time just observing habits. Certainly my willingness to feed him “pollutes” the data, but still there are interesting things to learn. In the spring, Gorilla,was eager to eat (my kids named him that after his chest beating poster when he/she wants food). Sometimes, he comes into my house, jumps up on the couch and looks at me. Hey, where are the nuts? In the spring or summer, he would eat maybe 2-3 peanuts and then, he’d stop. The rest, he just buried. This happened all summer. He eats a few, gets full and stops.

He’s not fat.

Fast forward to Fall and now Gorilla will not eat a single peanut. No matter what I do, every single peanut is immediately buried. He still comes to get them out of my hand. He still checks them out, but then it’s bounce, bounce, bounce off to bury the peanut. He knows that there are going to be a lot of days ahead with no food, so it’s time to store. This is, like all biology in the northern hemisphere, a time to conserve and prepare. Our friends down south, on the other hand, are actively making babies and having litters so that they can take the maximum amount of sun-time to grow and develop, while the long days give way to life-promoting light.

Our biology is inextricably intertwined with nature and I don’t think it requires supernatural or mystical to explain it. In time we are chipping away at the pieces, but for now there is a lot we don’t yet understand. What I’ve had the EXTREME privilege to do over the last 4 years is to live, experiment, and explore. It required many boring hours and resulted in minutes of unbridled excitement as ideas turned into confirming numbers on a computer screen. Countless hours of reflection, debate, and bewilderment, but now things are working in a very predictable way – natures way – we just take the time to stop and observe.

Gorilla doesn’t care about protein, carbs or fat and he likely won’t die of heart attack or stroke. Ok, right, I live in Alabama and for the record hunting isn’t allowed in the “city.”

Sleeping Your Ass Off

In the 4 Hour Body, Tim wrote about some of the various activities I did to “thermal load,” i.e. give my body a more difficult thermal environment to cope with and respond. I just wanted to reproduce that hypothesis about Michael Phelps’ enormous caloric intake. It worked and what began as social party small talk, launched into a new career and direction. Now Thousands have written and benefited from putting a little more “chill” in their life. I still get the ice-diet jabs, but they just glance off as many of us now know this is more than a fad diet.

Sleeping is a great time to boost RMR. In this eight day trial, waking RMR was boosted by an 22.5% by nothing more than sleeping more exposed by allowing room temperature to ride/lag with outdoor ambient. – unpublished Cronise.

In the spring, I conducted a few experiments on Sleep, RMR, and mild cold stress that mimic the environment in which our ancestors evolved. Unlike many, I don’t believe thermal load has to be severe or miserably cold. Although it’s taken some time to tease out results, I believe that bringing this evolutionary environment back into your life is not only easy, but enjoyable. Contrary to our overly warm-adapted, snuggie tendency, we sleep much better when cool.

In this case I merely recorded my waking RMR – using the Microlife BodyGem – to get an indication of what my waking RMR responded. The BodyGem only measures VO2 and it’s not calibrated before every test, but it does compare reasonably well to my new indirect calorimeter. What one learns on measuring metabolism frequently, is that its ALWAYS changing. The idea that we have a fixed “metabolism” or even a “slow one,” really a stretch. It barely stays still long enough to measure it – and THAT is the advantage you can leverage into additional “calorie out” victories.

But don’t take my word for it, give it a try. As the Fall comes on, I let the overall temperature in the house fall with the environment. It’s a way to plug back into nature’s cues much like you do with day/night and light. I now sleep with open windows well down into the 40sF/5C range. The house doesn’t drop quite that much, but it loosely tracks the outside. The process for adaption takes two steps:

1) Lose the necessity of the “weight” of the blanket

2) Adapt to lower temperatures

Step 1 is actually the most difficult part. Remember that the reason for lots of down-feathered duvets goes back to a time when bedrooms weren’t heated. In many homes just 100 years ago, only the central area was heated and bedroom heat was a luxury (with the exception of fat kings in castles). We used body heat – many times sleeping 2-4 in a bed – to keep warm on cold winter nights. Do you sleep with too many covers? Here’s a test: Do you put your feet out of the cover and/or can’t possibly sleep with socks?

How did he KNOW that?

If the answer is yes, here’s what is going on at night. You are overheating, but have such a psychological dependency on that heavy blanket that your body is trying to “fool itself” into believing you are “cool.” It’s dumping heat through your foot and at the same time fooling the brain with a strong sensor feedback that says it’s okay, I’m not REALLY overheating. Yes, you are. Meanwhile you are conserving heat. How much? More than you think and there is a significant effect on metabolism.

To complete step 1, simply slowly reign back to the sheet. First, blanket half way (you’ll wake up fully covered), then over your feet with sheet fully covered, and progress forward. You will find your “comfort” warm spot between you and the bed when you wake up. If a shoulder is cool, flip over to the “warm spot.” Once you master sleeping with a sheet, do the same thing with the sheet until you are sleeping largely uncovered. Room temps around 68-72 are fine, because after all, we don’t really walk around in blankets. Here’s where it takes a – don’t laugh until you try it – twist. Once you get down to removing sheets – put on gloves and socks. I still like the weight on my feet, so a cover at the end of the bed works well for me.

Don’t laugh. Just like going out for a chilly walk, covering the SYMPTOMS without shielding the torso, is a great way to help your body adapt – gloves before sweater make you look better. I promise that as stupid as it may feel, During News Years resolutions – you’ll be feasting not fasting. Start NOW. Yes, I really don’t sleep with covers.

Step 2 is the easy part in that once you master step 1, it’s all a matter of letting your body get used to outside temperatures. It begins in the morning and it just requires the attitude to expose more and more time to cool. No ice baths or miserable plunges are involved. No one’s died in a modern home or apartment due to lack of blankets. It’s a simple modification that adds up over the year. The gloves and socks will most likely be critical and you can even try a ski mask if it’s really cold. At this point I have lost some of you, but have I told you how much I DON’T want to run marathons – isn’t it much better to sleep off that urge?

If you’re camping, pack an additional higher temperature rated bag and start there. You will wake up well rested and feeling REALLY great.

Why So Quiet?

Shivering for science…

Looking forward to hearing some of your feedback and observations. I will have more data on this soon.

I want to thank everyone for staying active on the comments, checking in on me, and keeping dialog going over the last two and a half months. Honestly, I couldn’t be MORE excited about what’s been going on with science/self experiments. There are a whole series of posts that will come out and expect that I will not only get back on schedule from here on, but you’ll see post frequency increase as some of these results are made public. Occasionally it’s prudent to stop filling space with eloquent assertions and wrapping bows around other people’s work and just roll up your sleeves and create new.

I guess with our dismal results a good argument could be made that we need much more sleeve rolling and my assertion is that its absence is precisely what’s lead to the ubiquitous protein-carb-fat myth. That being said, there is a TON of great peer reviewed literature that doesn’t fit current world views that is plainly ignored. Thermal Environment is a small example.

…measuring metabolism during workouts

I’ve had Astronauts, Scientists, writers and rock stars spend time with me over the last couple of months and they all seem to be understanding it despite coming from different backgrounds/educations. Our biology is elegantly simple, but intensely difficult to describe. I’m taking a “top down” approach – beginning with basic observation, while throwing out the rulebook and trying to not accept anything without some verification. As I inch closer, a new picture is emerging and it’s been directly applied with many people helped.

I have an AMAZING team of experts assembled and have reestablished connections with academia to leverage my N of 1 work into repeatable, measured, and objective publishable results. It so easy to cast off lack of data on assertions of industry conspiracy/coverup, big business and “it can’t be measured.” A lot of claims are made and, I think, promised claims and trust broken by what has become a food-nutrtion-diet-supplement industry quagmire.

It has NEVER been easier to do research. Access to technology is incredible – I can only imagine where we would be if we had the diligence of late 19th/early 20th century scientists. As I have been reviewing early literature I am in complete awe of the sheer VOLUME of work/observation that they made with such little equipment. Perhaps excel makes it too easy to graph and draw correlations and we’ve become a little complacent and lazy with hard observation. Certainly the internet has not helped in the unsubstantiated claims department, but it’s also created a unprecedented opportunity for quality work at the individual level. This crowd-sourced research WILL make huge advancements over the next few decades – I am certain.

Mid life crisis indirect calorimeter. I don’t need a fancy car.

I’ve had a lot of offers to just “cash in,” but decided to dig a little deeper. It’s way too easy to slide into justifying your current story when clearly the data says it’s broken. We all know the story is broken with the obesity/chronic disease pandemic and it’s not a macronutrient ratios, nor is it lack of exercise, or even genetic destiny. It’s NOT a low metabolism caused by skipping a meal (boy, will I EVER live down propagating that myth?). I think it can be measured and fixed and I have a growing number of real world examples that seem to prove the point, but time will tell.

In the Next blog – Muscling Your Metabolism – we’ll look at some of the incredible advancements

Thanks for your support as always!

Fat – Part 1

By admin On November 28, 2011 · 59 Comments

What an incredible month and I can’t believe November came and is gone. “Fat bottom girls, you make the rockin world go round…” It’s time to dive into Fat. It’s sort of the original sin of food. Unlike proteins and carbohydrate, most of us know when we have too much of it around. We covered some material in the BATgirl posts – predominately the “brown” flavor, so now let’s talk about the “white version.” After we discuss a little bit about how we get it and how to lose it, we will pick up with the dietary forms of fat.

Look at this image. Do you feel your fat suit? I did when I was 50 lbs heavier and I do right now as I gear up to take the last 15 or so off.

Everyone by now has heard me say, “you can’t out-exercise your mouth.” I think most realize that movement is amazing for health, but relative to how many calories one can stuff into their mouth on any given day, movement is probably only a small part of the weight loss plan. Here is the corollary to that quote: You must go on a high fat diet to lose weight.

It’s ALWAYS true. Let’s see why.

Saving For a Rainy Day

I hope everyone came away understanding that carbohydrate is neither bad, nor unhealthy. We have been taught in the last few years to fear carbs and before that it was fat. The reality is that our bodies run on a carbohydrate based economy – Glucose. When we consume too much energy, the evolutionary survival trait kicks in and we naturally store this energy as fat in adipose tissue to use at a later day.

Our problem is the later day never comes.

In organic chemistry we refer to this class of compounds as Lipids. They are mostly carbon and hydrogen, but are very different than carbohydrates. For one, they are typically insoluble in water – you’ve seen the oil floating in vinegar and oil dressing. Lipids act in the same way. There are three main categories of Lipids: Fats, phospholipids, and steroids.

We have discussed Free Fatty Acids (FFA) being used by the mitochondria to produce ATP (or heat in presence of up regulating proteins). In general, fatty acids are how we store fat in chains of about 18 carbons long. In some sense they look a lot like the chains of glucose in starch, but are typically shorter in length. FFA are just the units of these that have been mobilized to use as energy, analogous to the free glucose that is freed from starch/glycogen. The bonds in these fat molecules have a LOT of energy, which is why our bodies use them to store for a rainy day.

When the rainy day never comes and we continue to go back to the table to refuel, there’s no hiding where it goes.

Cholesterol is a steroid of fat that is produced by the liver and intestines and is used as a starting material to produce other important materials in our body like Vitamin D and cell Membranes.

Phosopholipds are manufactured to create the “lipid bilayer” of cell membranes. One end is the fat we are discussing – it wants to repel water (hydrophobic – phobos Greek for fear) and the other end is REALLY attracted to water (hydrophilic – philia Greek for love). These form a sandwich with the water loving side pointed to the inside and outside of the cell and the “fatty part” in the middle. This keeps things from freely passing from one side to the other.

I won’t get into any more details, but I hope you have a taste of how this range of lipid molecules are related. Many don’t know that cholesterol is a steroid or that it is a form of fat. Others might not know that very important molecules, like Vitamin D come from cholesterol our bodies (and other animals) make. As well, every single cell in your body is absolutely dependent on fat for it’s membrane as are many of the bioactive molecules.

Fats are important and it is a shame that we now use the word “fat” to monolithically categorize food. Like “carbs,” it’s simply a bad idea. It leads to many people becoming confused and obsessed with managing something in hopeless ways. Our results in managing our weight speak for themselves. We have used the “macronutrient shuffle” to move society into unprecedented chronic disease. When your body NEEDs fat, it can make it. Now, if it has enough ability to manufacture all of these necessary components like cholesterol and fatty acids, what do you think happens when it is simply OVERRUN with the stuff by consuming excess amounts of it in your diet?

System break downs. Oh, but I eat the HEALTHY kind. I need more Omega-3s. Yeah, right.

Heart disease, diabetes, and other chronic illness end up consuming your health, but managing “fat” alone is not the answer. I am not certain that eating it in massive excess trains the body to deal with it any better. A commenter on Carbohydrate Part – 3 tried to count (a very small list) of fat regulating hormones to justify why we don’t need to eat carbohydrate. Since most hormones, all cell walls, and the primary energy storage is all based in a FAT economy, don’t you think we would have a few extra processes hanging around? Eating is one activity and our preferred, day to day, economy of energy is carbohydrate – glucose.

I understand his confusion. In fact I think one of the most profound statements at TEDMED 2011 was, “molecular biology has failed.” What was meant by the speaker is that there is not just one genetic pathway to health – identify the bad gene and eradicate it was the naive thought we had pre-Human genome knowledge. Now we understand that there exists a “symphony” of reactions that are going on and we don’t have to understand each one to manage them. Instead we can manage in a more holistic approach.

Your body CAN shift over and stuff fat into that primarily energy economy if that is what it is given (or you are starving), but it is not our primary operating mode (glucose, glycogen, blood sugar). When you run out of glucose/glycogen your body naturally starts metabolizing fat. This is why the Atkins-type diets are so effective short term. They mimic starvation mode. When this fat is gone (and we’ll see sometime before) the body can metabolize protein (your muscle). These are the phases of starvation. Deplete short term energy, move to long term, and then go into complete survival to “protect the brain and organs” and sacrifice the arms, lets, etc..

Not too unlike what we learned about getting cold – stop flowing blood to the extremities and protect the core.

Under a NORMAL diet, we get alarmed when excess ketones (byproducts of this fat metabolism) show up in urine. ketogenesis is the result of going into a fat-based economy and often looking for ketones in the urine is a sign that you have switched over. As the two of the main ketone groups, acetoacetate and beta-hydroxybutyrate, are very acidic, blood pH can drop, which results in ketoacidosis. The other ketone formed is acetone – fingernail polish remover, well, before they removed it because it was unhealthy.

All in all, these byproducts are a natural part of Fat metabolism. You have to go through this process to shed those love handles. I think doing it like I did in yo-yo dieting probably has a very unhealthy effect – I just don’t like the idea of acetone running through my system. This is one of the issues that is unresolved in eating – is long term ketosis detrimental to health?

It seems to me that living in this mode is not healthy long term even though short term it is VERY effective in losing body fat. I think the positive longevity benefits associated with caloric restriction are from nutrient dense, calorically poor diets. While on the surface these two forms of “starvation” may share a common name, it’s likely the outcome is very different. Just my speculation.

Your High Fat Diet

photo: Issac Hinds bodybuilding.com

So, this might come as a complete surprise, but the way you lose weight is to go on a natural high-fat diet. In fact it is EXCLUSIVELY the way you lose, because it is YOUR fat that you need to digest. At it’s basic level weight loss is actually quite simple in theory: eat enough micronutrients (the maintenance stuff – vitamins, minerals, essential amino acids) to keep the system running and then consume your “gas reserves” for energy.

If you want want a 6-pack (btw, everyone has one) you have to remove enough fat to SHOW it. You just can’t see it through your “fat suit.” lose body fat (without muscle atrophy, or break down) and stay toned with a moderate amount of exercise and you WILL look fit.

Now some of us don’t have as much muscle mass and putting that on is a completely different topic. As any bodybuilder will tell you there are two steps to their sport: 1) Putting on mass (excess calorie combined with muscle stress/exercise) and 2) dropping body fat for competition (right Christy?) .

While some level of fitness can be maintained (you don’t need to become obese), putting on muscle mass typically comes with some extra body fat (and water) that are normally shed just before competition. Most body builders would be hard pressed to stay at this extremely low (some unhealthy) level for much time.

The point here is that the way you shed fat is to restrict caloric intake (of any kind) and just focus on high nutrient food. This is most easily accomplished with plants/fiber, but there are other ways to do it as well. The part I want you to keep in mind with EVERY BITE is that if you are putting calories IN, then the body does not have to tap into calories OUT of your fat reserves. Remember the gas station analogy?

There are very healthy ways to create caloric restriction and stay satiated throughout the process. Remember this point as well – the body does not KNOW it is fat. Therefore, anything you do to push it away from its CURRENT set point (reduce calories) it will see as starvation and most likely turn on hunger.

There is a base to metabolic restriction that the body can’t get around and we will see in Part 2 that increasing cold exposure with added exercise will preferentially send free fatty acids out to be metabolized by mitochondria for heat and can create a one-two punch on the love handles.

**************
Do you like these blogs and want to help me? Please take a minute to scroll up on the right side of the screen consider making a monthly donation to this program. You can also make a one time donation here:

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