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New Paper Submitted, Accepted, and Corrected!

By admin On November 14, 2016 · 35 Comments

Let me start with a request: I need your help getting our new paper open source fee funded. Here’s how this publishing process works: there are legitimate journals and trash journals. Some have higher reach than others (impact factor). If someone wants to be “published,” they can find a journal to put their work in print. Ideally, the peer-review process proceeds something like this: one submits to a journal, the editorial staff accepts or rejects the manuscript for the review process. If selected, it moves, blinded, to a panel of reviewers that are experts in the field (meaning they are anonymous to the author). The comments and criticisms are returned or the paper is rejected outright. If the former, after corrections are made, the journal moves forward with publication. The process allows great ideas to be vetted, but there are times when valid papers aren’t moved forward due to politics, even in respected journals. It happens and some editors can introduce bias, but on a whole I would say that this is the exception, and not the rule. Unfortunately, there are people gaming the system with misleading titles, abstracts, and conclusions and this leads to confusion and obfuscation for those that don’t have their pulse on a particular field.

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

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

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

~ Justus von Liebig

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

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

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

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

Help Me Get The Word Out

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

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

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

Reflections

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s not Magic or Rocket Science…

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our Broken Plate

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

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

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

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

Thanks!

Ray

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

In the SWIM of Things

By admin On June 21, 2011 · 50 Comments

I’m not much of a swimmer, but I want to be. In 2011 it is a major personal fitness goal to try to swim more frequently. The interesting irony is that I was in the pool and spa industry for about a decade and yet I wasn’t ever a swimmer. Most are not; in fact, health and fitness isn’t very common in the industry at all. There seems to be more focus on fountains than fitness.

It’s the first day of summer here the the Northern Hemisphere…to all of the readers in the Southern part of the world, you are in the thermal loading sweet spot right now – enjoy.

My initial thoughts of thermal loading came from a detailed analysis of Michael Phelps and his enormous caloric intake. I was able to talk to him for a few minutes this fall and finally thank him for the inspiration.

If you google “weight loss and swimming,” you’ll find site after site that indicates swimming is bad for losing weight or that swimmers tend to put on body fat. I’ve done an exhaustive literature review and I am confident that both of these assertions are wrong. Most of the quotes comparing swimming, running and cycling find their root in an 1987 study by Gwinup (1). In it, he compares the three activities in the absence of caloric restriction or monitoring of any kind.

Essentially this study followed moderately obese women in one of three activities, walking, stationary bicycle, and swimming over a 6 month period. This is probably one of the most extensively cited papers I have seen. The results were that walking and cycling caused a drop in weight and swimmers actually gained. It is astounding that it’s been 24 years ago and not much more has been completed.

The problem with the study as I see it is they didn’t ask the people to restrict diet in any way. If in fact swimming could result in a greater caloric burn due to the thermal load of the water, couldn’t that explain the increase hunger? If they were not instructed on how to specifically counter this, would that account for the weight gain? This is generally applied to everyone, but wouldn’t someone that is applying swimming as part of a comprehensive diet/exercise program understand they had to keep calories restricted?

It is plausible to expect that the additional drain of energy from the thermal load of the water could cause the body to signal hunger. Remember, the body regulates heat (energy) not temperature, so we might expect the body to simply turn on the hunger mechanism in response to the energy deficit caused by increased heat drain. Most importantly, might we expect that armed with this knowledge, we could turn off, or resist, this hunger trigger with proper diet and nutrition?

I believe the answer is yes.

Gappmaier (2) had some VERY harsh words in 2006 retort to the oft-cited Gwinup paper. He felt that while the data Gwinup suggested from his study might substantiate the opinion offered, the other labs cited in the paper have never published any data/papers supporting it. Gappmaier’s view was that most of the research on modes of aerobic exercise had gone into the cardiorespiratory changes, not weight loss. In the end, Gwinup didn’t control the very variable that was necessary to draw his conclusions, nevertheless, it has been cited over and over for the last 24 years.

Gappmaier found that with similar frequency, duration, and intensity, swimming results are comparable in terms of weight loss. This parity is good news, but of course it likely is based on a relatively warm and consistent water temperature and that is where I think the big opportunities to boost the results reside going forward.

In the last year, I really wanted to find a better way to thermal load in the summer. As well, I wanted to know exactly what the truth is concerning water thermal conductivity and the Human body’s loss of thermal energy (calories). There is no doubt it happens, but there is a question of rate. A somewhat exhaustive review of the literature on the thermoregulatory side found that the simple one dimensional math model I outlined two years ago gave a pretty good fit to actual Human data of the 50s & 60s.

This data was collected to assess macronutrient requirements of military personnel in a cold stress environment; ironically they were studies on how to keep weight on, not lose it. I know it works, but what are the best methods and how quickly can one lose?

I’ve talked with MANY people following both the TEDMED talk and 4HB and I am astonished at just how much fear we have of cold as a society. In fact, the fear is so great that people often interpret “cool” as cold and begin to bundle at what was a very comfortable room temperature just a few years ago.

Over that last 2 months I have been putting in a new lab and looking at methods to better assess my own progress. Taking one for the “Team” out there, I put about 12 lbs on and want to take it off (with interest) using a solid diet/nutrition plan and swimming. I now have the capability to go down to 45F/7C water temperature for swimming in a swim spa…we’ll see how brave I get.

What I know for sure is that there are studies that seem to verify increased hunger associated with swimming. All of the other references you see, in one way or another, lead back to Gwinup 87. The vast majority don’t control diet at the same time and suggest that increase hunger makes swimming a futile process for weight loss.

I am not buying it.

I have spoken to so many ex-swimmers that rave about weight loss when getting back into the water. The thermal models say it should work. Most importantly, swimming is probably one the very few physical activities that one can do for a lifetime. You can start at any age or level of fitness and if it IS hot and sticky, it’s a fantastic way to relax.

I still need your help in part of this. I am going to begin collecting data in the next few weeks. Part of what I really need to add to all of the current equipment is a thermal imager. Be sure to click the voting widget up and to the right and I’ll be sending out requests soon in attempts to get this funded.

So, if you are a swimmer, get your suit on and dive in…even BETTER if you are a swimmer going into winter in the southern hemisphere >grin<. I’ll be subjecting myself to even more extreme self-experiments over the coming months and will report back what I learn.

If you haven’t learned to swim- I feel your pain. I too had an incredibly difficult time getting instruction as an adult. I wasn’t afraid of water (once an avid scuba diver), just didn’t know how to “swim laps;” thanks goes out to Al Bayhi @ iSport.com. If you are in the Bay-area, this guy is THE best.

After much personal study of the Total Immersion techniques, as Tim describes in 4HB, I was able to move from zero ability to swimming comfortably over a 5 day period, 3 hours of instruction a day. It was sort of a brutal immersion, but I REALLY learned a lot. From the aches and pains it is clear to me that I exerted a lot of physical energy during the process.

Swimmin is a great compliment to whatever exercise/diet program you are doing, so get into the swim of things and shed some unwanted body fat.

1. Gwinup, G. (1987). Weight loss without dietary restriction: Efficacy of different forms of aerobic exercise. American Journal of Sports Medicine, 15, 275-279

2. Gappmaier E, Lake W, Nelson AG, Fisher AG. Aerobic exercise in water versus walking on land: effects on indices of fat reduction and weight loss of obese women The Journal of Sports Medicine and Physical Fitness 2006, 46:564-569

Housekeeping @ Thermogenex

By admin On February 1, 2011 · 7 Comments

It’s been an incredible 6 weeks… I really appreciate all the emails and comments and the amazing number of people that have signed up to read and follow this site. I know what everyone is asking,

“Ray, can you just tell me what to do?”

The answer is YES, but hang on a bit. One thing I expected would happen is the “me too” people that would just start driveling about being cold and losing weight. The other expectation was that it would be presented as miserable and extreme. I wanted to support the ideas within The 4-hour body before beginning to suggest alternative/complementary approaches. Unfortunately, the health and fitness industry is loaded people that earn expert status by learning a few new words. Face it, we’ve never been more unfit as a species and we’ve also never spent more achieving it. That’s quite a contradiction.

Perhaps it’s time to change that even if it’s just a small group of us.

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