The Fat in your diet is not the Fat on your Hips…(or Belly or Thighs or…)

Posted on October 29, 2011 by jghethe

Welcome back!!

There has and continues to be a lot of debate about the best ways to lose weight. Regular readers know that I think that is a poor term – what we want is to drop fat!!

Eating fat in your diet is not associated with cancer

Regardless – if you talk to a Dietician or Nutritionist – they say it is all in the food & calories or else in eliminating particular foods or eating special ones. Doctors tend to say eat less and exercise more. Personal Trainers will emphasise exercise.

One thing that they will all tell you is to eat less dietary fat, that fat in your diet is the enemy and you should eliminate it.

They’re wrong.

More & more research is coming to light that shows that dietary fat is in fact beneficial to your metabolism, your nutrient partitioning and your health. The real message that we should be getting is that most fats are good.

The Chairman of of the Department of Nutrition of the Harvard School of Public Health, Dr Walter Willett, said back in 2000 that ” the relationship of fat intake to health is one of the areas that we have examined in detail over the last 20 years in our 2 cohort studies: The Nurses Health Study & the Health Professionals Follow Up Study. We found virtually no relationship between the percentage of calories from fat and any important health outcome.” (Bold & Italics mine)

So what you say – that was 11 years ago… but wait a study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition saw researchers reporting on the results of a recent study looked at the relationship of dietary fat and cancer risk using data taken from 4 separate studies in Great Britain.

But Trans fats will increase your cancer risk...

They looked at the data from 657 breast cancer cases in pre and post menopausal women and compared this data to 1911 control subjects. Essentially they crossed tracked the results with the incidence of breat cancer, with a specific interest in this and the intake of saturated, polyunsaturated and monounsaturtated fats.

They were unable to find any link.

Yep none. In fact what they did find was that those with a higher dietary fat intake actually enjoyed a slight protective effect. In fact the highest fat intake when compared to the lowest has a 10% reduction in the liklihood of breast cancer.

Now before you go off and start eating deep fried foods etc there are a couple of things for you to put into perspective:

Let’s be very clear – your risk of various cancers (not to mention other chronic health ailments) rises in line with your body fat – this is an identified and recognised medical fact.

Carrying extra body fat, especially a lot of extra body fat is a definite risk factor for many cancer types. Fat cells pump out hormones and inflammatory substances which can increase the risk of cancer (&diabetes & heart disease &…)

The fat on your plate, the marbling in your steak – are not the same as the fat on your belly or on your hips.

You don’t get fat from eating fat. Fat does not magically go from your plate through your digestive system & end up on your waist. You get fat from eating more calories than your body needs for your level of activity.

The percentage of fat in the excess food in your diet does not matter at all when it comes to putting on fat.

It's the Trans fats that'll do you in...

Likewise if you are lean & active – if you are eating calories in line with what your body needs for fuel & to stay lean, then the percentage of those calories that come from fat doesn’t matter either.

The fact is that dietary fat intake has little to no effect on insulin and doesn’t stimulate the fat storing hormones in the same way that an identical number of extra calories from sugar, or cereals or bread or pastries will.

There is one fat, and one fat only to be vigilant about: Trans fats. These, along with high fructose corn syrup are man made disasters and responsible for more health issues than any thing else we have in our diets.

If the fat on your plate has been excessively heated, or does not come from a whole food source, then don’t eat it.

So do something about the fat on your belly & hips – but don’t lose too much sleep about the fat on your plate or in your diet (so long as it is not transfats!!) We know that in order to lose fat you have to increase your metabolism through regular challenging exercise, use foods in a strategic way to support a faster metabolism and to manipulate your hormones (Leptin, Ghrelin etc) and generally avoid nutrient sparse but energy dense processed foods.

In a nut shell – you can’t out train a poor diet. But you can lose fat quicker and become healthier by combining these three things:

Exercise
Food choice
The intelligent use of 1 & 2 to manipulate your hormones

We can't all look like this, but dietary fat in line with our calorie needs won't be the reason if we don't...

In reality, the key to losing body fat is to adopt a strategic, holistic approach that emphasises an intelligent diet, good challenging exercise and lots of rest.

The rules are simple – eat as much nutrient dense, unprocessed, as-close-to-whole-foods as possible, line up your calorie intake with your energy needs, exercise often & in a challenging fashion, move more, sit less and get a full night’s sleep.

Not only will you be healthier anbd happier but you’ll stop worrying about bogeymen like dietary fat.

See you next week.

From Dr. Johnny Bowden – Why You Don’t Need to Worry About that Women and Vitamins Study

Posted on October 22, 2011 by jghethe

Welcome Back!

As most of you know I rarely have guest posts and even more rarely do I re-publish something from someone else.

However the post I’ve included today is so important for our understanding of how the media and unfortunately many medical companies & practitioners twist the tuth to give their p[referred story that I felt that I had to put ti up here.

The original can be found here: http://jonnybowdenblog.com/women-and-vitamins-study/bowden.

If you’re not on his mailing list you should be – he provides great, unbiased information. (& no I am NOT an affiliate, nor do I earna cent from recommending his site…)

Without further ado – here is this imprtant article – it’s long but well worth a read. More from me next week.

Why You Don’t Need to Worry About that Women and Vitamins Study

by Dr. Jonny · 14 comments

Before I start talking about that vitamin study you all want to know about, I want to say a few words about MSNBC and FOX NEWS.

Trust me, it’s relevant.

No matter what side of the political fence you’re on, I’m sure you’ll agree that cable news has become extremely shrill and highly partisan. Both MSNBC and FOX may agree on the facts they are reporting but then spin them in an entirely different way to reach entirely different conclusions.

Each political argument is founded on certain “if’s, and’s and “maybes”; i.e. this policy will lower (or raise) the debt assuming certain projections (such as medical costs or unemployment) are in fact true. Different researchers come up with very different projections (just read the Wall Street Journal stock advice columns!) Depending on whose projections and figures you use, even well-intentioned honest people can come to very different conclusions.

So why am I talking about cable news in a story about women and vitamins?

Because, sadly, the same thing that happens on cable news happens in nutrition science.

The problem is everyone knows it’s happening in cable news, but people naively think science is always “objective” and reporting about science is actually accurate.

Neither is true.

Take the latest scary study that’s got everybody all a-dwiddle about how if you’re an older woman taking some common vitamins, you might die.

The Media’s Take: Fair and Balanced, Anyone?

Let’s start with the reporting. One typical headline I saw about this story shrieked, “More Bad News About Vitamins!” Now if you read that without slowly shaking your head, go back and think for a minute about what’s implied in that headline.

We’re talking one study with a very mildly (and very questionable) negative result (we’ll get to that in a minute).

Now compare that one study to the dozens and dozens and dozens of studies that come out on a regular basis showing the benefits of vitamin K, vitamin D, vitamin C, minerals like selenium, magnesium, fats like omega-3’s, and even- in several studies- the lowly multivitamin. A writer or newspaper or television station with a different slant might easily have titled this story, “A Surprising Negative Study on Vitamins Amidst a Sea of Positive Ones”. “More Bad News About Vitamins!”? Serious?

(Yes, I used “serious?” instead of “seriously” on purpose. I feel like it gives me street cred. Please humor me.)

OK now let’s get to the study itself, and what it found.

Which isn’t very much. But let’s take a look.

“Let’s Go To The Videotape”

The study was titled “Dietary Supplements and Mortality Rate in Older Women: The Iowa Women’s Health Study“.

The researchers took the database of the Iowa Women’s Health Study and examined the records of 38,772 older women- average age 61.2 at the start of the study—looking specifically at their use of dietary supplements.

Well, they didn’t exactly look at the women at all, since it was not a clinical study. No one was given supplements and monitored, supplement use wasn’t confirmed by any outside source, nothing like that. No, they assessed supplement use with three….count ‘em, three… self-reporting questionnaires given to the women at three different points during the 18 year study, which began in 1986 and continued through 2004. (No one was asked about doses, brands, combinations, nothing. Just “did you use a supplement?” “Yes: Vitamin C, vitamin B, vitamin E, multivitamin, calcium, iron”.)

OK, cool, see you in 11 years or so!

The researchers then examined the death records through the State Health Registry of Iowa and through the National Death Index. They checked for all original 38,772 women and found that by Dec. 31, 2008, 15,594 of them had indeed died. (Which was approximately 40% of the women. But do remember, at baseline- 1986—they were pushing 62. This is 22 years later. An optimistic way to look at it is that 60% of these ladies were living into their mid-eighties! But I digress, and this really has nothing to do with the story.)

But that’s OK, because the study itself is pretty boring and doesn’t have very much to tell us. Although you’d never know it from the media attention it got (see above).

First let’s look at the conclusions of the study, then we’ll talk about what they mean. (Spoiler alert: they mean next to nothing. I’ll show you why.)

The conclusions of the study (in the researchers’ words): “In older women, several commonly used dietary vitamin and mineral supplements may be associated with increased total mortality risk; this association is strongest with supplemental iron. In contrast to the findings of many studies, calcium is associated with decreased risk”.

Since the words “associated” or “association” are used three times in the above paragraph, let’s take a minute and look at what an association (observational) study actually is.

What Exactly Is An “Observational” Study?

In an observational study from which many associations are generated, you take a whole bunch of people- thousands of them—and you gather data about a zillion different things.

Maybe it’s blood pressure and cholesterol, maybe it’s heart disease, maybe it’s what they ate for breakfast, how often they brush their teeth, how many of their parents had diabetes, how many of them own television sets, practice the rhumba, love Lady Gaga, take antidepressants, or pop a Centrum now and then.

OK now you’ve got a statistician’s version of heaven—tons and tons of data. Eighty gazillion gigabytes of numbers from thousands of people, and it’s your job to see if there’s any pattern, to determine which things are “associated”, meaning “found together”. If two things are said to be associated, that means there is some relationship between these two things that’s unlikely to be an accident.

Which brings us to “yellow finger syndrome”.

Correlation, Cause and “Yellow Finger Syndrome”

Interestingly, people with lung cancer are more likely to have yellow, stained fingers. So yellow stained fingers are positively “associated” (correlated) with lung cancer. In any given group, the more cases of yellow fingers you see, the more cases of cancer are likely.

Hmm…so who would have yellow fingers?

Let me guess. Smokers?

You can see in this case how wrong it would be to assume that because two things are associated, there is a cause and effect relationship. An association is not proof of cause. Yellow fingers don’t cause lung cancer, and lung cancer doesn’t cause yellow fingers. They’re found together because they’re both associated with a third variable, namely smoking. Smoking causes lung cancer, and yellow fingers are a kind of irrelevant by-product of the real cause. (This kind of mistake is made all the time in cholesterol studies where high cholesterol is “associated” with heart disease except it’s not a cause even though everyone thinks it is. But I digress.)

So one thing we might ask is, what else might be true of women who are taking vitamins? Remember this study began in 1986, and vitamin usage wasn’t what it is now. Maybe these people were a bit sicker at baseline and were seeking out vitamins as a way of not getting sicker? Maybe they were people who were eating a particularly bad diet and told themselves that vitamin caps would make up for it? Who knows?

You always have to ask yourself, with any association, what else might be going on here? What else might be interfering with or “confounding” the results? Were all the vitamin takers, for example, also soccer players? (Of course not, but there’s a wild example of how an uncontrolled variable can have a huge effect on the results without anyone noticing.)

The Confounding Variable Issue

Researchers are very aware of confounding variables, so they try to adjust for these influences with statistical techniques (“adjusting for possible confounding variables”) but they don’t always adjust for the right ones. Or they can over adjust and wind up with an “association” that’s a pure statistical fluke. I’ll come back to this “adjusting” thing in a minute- it’s very relevant to our little story, and wait till you hear how it relates to this study.

Though you’d never know it in a million years from any newspaper article or television story about this study, here’s what was true of the supplement using women at the beginning of the study: (This is taken directly from the actual research paper in the Archives of Internal Medicine.)

“At baseline, compared to nonusers, supplement users:

had a lower prevalence of diabetes
had a lower prevalence of high blood pressure
smoked less
had lower average BMI
had lower average waist to hip ratio
had higher educational levels
were more physically active
were more likely to be on estrogen replacement therapy

Then, get this—(you’re going to love this one!)

Adjusted for age and (calorie) intake, supplement use of vitamin B complex, vitamins C, D and E and calcium had significantly lower risk of total mortality compared to nonuse.

Wait, I thought the study concluded vitamin takers had a higher risk of total mortality?

Patience, grasshopper. We aren’t finished with the data.

OK, the researchers must’ve thought, age and calories are important, glad we adjusted for those, but there are probably a few other things to adjust for, so they did just that. “With further adjustment only the use of calcium retained a significantly lower risk of mortality”, they explain.

So none of the vitamins (except calcium) had a protective effect, which was exactly the hypothesis they set out to prove. (Their words: “Our hypothesis, based on the findings of a previous study by some of us, was that the use of dietary supplements would not be associated with a reduced rate of total mortality”.)

Great, hypothesis confirmed, vitamins suck, we can all go home now, right?

Ah what the heck. Let’s squeeze the data a little more, throw in some more things, see what we come up with.

Uh oh. Squeeze that data even more and presto now those three-times-in-18 years self-reports of vitamin use are now “associated” with a higher rate of mortality.

Do I have to tell you they were serving champagne that day in every marketing department of every pharmaceutical company in America?

So What’s the Risk?

The real punch line is that with all that hoopla, what “increased risk” of mortality are we talking about? Depending on the vitamin, maybe 6%- 15%. But let’s look at what that means, since it sounds way worse than it is.

Let’s say non-vitamin users died at a rate of 15 per 1000. A 6% increase in the risk of dying associated with vitamin use would mean that vitamin users would be now be expected to die at a rate of 15.9 women per 1000. A 10% increase in risk would mean that 16.5 women per 1000 would be expected to die. Now that’s no small thing if you happen to be among the .9 – 1.5 women affected, but let’s keep it in perspective. It’s a tiny association of questionable meaning-not exactly the death toll for the multivitamin, as Dr. David Katz solemnly proclaimed it on the Huffington Post.

I mean, come on.

Look, I’m not dismissing this study completely. But I am saying that there’s very little likelihood there’s anything to it. Put enough data into the mix and you can come up with associations to make almost any case. (The China Study, T. C. Campbell’s book about The China Project—a massive study of diet and health in rural China– is a perfect example of this kind of data selecting. Out of 8000 associations generated in the original China Project, T.C. Campbell picked just those that supported his pro-vegan hypothesis and put them in his book, The China Study, conveniently omitting all the many associations that refuted his theory. But don’t get me started.)

Now if I were preparing a scholarly rebuttal to this study, I’d put it in perspective by citing the the hundreds of studies that have shown benefits for vitamins and minerals. I could easily go back and search out the many, many studies showing how low folic acid is a risk for cancer, how folic acid helps prevent spinal tube birth defects, how vitamin D affects mood, physical performance, obesity, cancer, how vitamin C increases phagytosis (a function of the immune system), how magnesium is associated with lower blood pressure and better blood sugar control, indeed how virtually every vitamin tested in the study has been shown in other studies to perform vitally important functions essential to your health.

But honestly, I give speeches, write books and columns and run a health website for a living. I don’t have research assistants. I don’t have graduate student interns who can look all this stuff up and find the references.

So what I’m hoping is that one of the more brilliant health bloggers like Denise Minger or Chris Masterjohn, avowed and self-described data-nerds, will spend a week sitting up all night with the research and will come up with their usual brilliant, referenced, unimpeachable, “just the facts, ma’am” rebuttals to the findings in this study.

Meanwhile let me just say this: It’s a tempest in a teapot.

Does it make any logical sense that in a study of over 30,000 women lasting 19 years, with eight gazillion other factors involved, popping the equivalent of a Centrum or One-A-Day (or saying that you did on the three questionnaires you filled out over the course of the study) made you more likely to die?

Seriously?

That just doesn’t pass the smell test for me.

Harness the Power of Insulin

Posted on October 14, 2011 by jghethe

Welcome back –

There have been millions of words written and many millions more I’m sure to come all on the subject of how to lose weight and build muscle. Now regular readers know that I hate the term ’lose weight’ it is inaccurate & wrong – your goal is to lose body fat. It is entirely possible to lose kilos of fat but have the scales drop by less than that amount because you’ve added some muscle.

So losing weight is out, losing fat is in.

The questions usually revolve around two polar opposites – either how do you eat to add muscle without adding fat, or how to diet to lose fat whilst still adding muscle.

Do use intermittent fasting? Atkins? Palm Beach? Drink Shakes 3 x a day? Run miles every day? Work out twice a day? Eat low carb? Eat high carb? Add the latest magic food?

You know there are plenty of available strategies to consider and they all try to address one or both of the needs mentioned above but results are mixed. What works for some fails for others. The unpalatable truth is that there is no magic one-size fits every metabolism solution available. The cookie cutter approach needs to stay in the kitchen with the pastry.

For Fat Loss there isn't a cookie cutter approach...

There is a common thread in all of the effective strategies though – they utilise your metabolism to work with you for the desired results and they all – the ALL – harness the power of insulin.

Insulin has been given a bad rap in the popular press – it does not cause obesity, it is not the ‘fat hormone’. It is true because it is a ‘carrier’ hormone insulin has the ability to induce fat storage if the environment allows for this.

However id allowed to work as it is supposed insulin is in fact the single most anabolic hormone present in your body (remember anabolic means build, catabolic is to tear down)

Insulin ensures that your cells are ‘fed’, that amino acids are taken up and protein synthesis is completed.

Energy cannot be destroyed, just transformed.

If I remember my High School science correctly we were taught that energy can be changed from one form to another (ie transformed) but it can’t be created or destroyed.

To lose body fat you need to use up more energy than you take in. To lose a pound you need to either take in an amount equal to; or use up a total of 3500 calories. To gain weight (I deliberately did not say fat in this case – to build serious muscle you have to eat a lot of nutrient dense foods. Google Chris Hemsworth’s diet for his muscle gain for Thor) you have to ingest more calories than you need to remain in energy homeostasis if you are going to support lean tissue gains.

Serious training needs serious eating to support serious growth...

Of course if you eat more than you need and you are not exercising to create lean body mass then you’ll get fat. The Bottom line is that if you eat too much, without the mitigating effects of high intensity exercise, you’ll get fat, no matter where the calories are coming from.

In the real world, the world without chemical interdiction of the body’s processes, there is simply no mystical combination of nutrients – macro, micro or otherwise – of meal timing of super supplements etc et that can change this fact. It simply is – eat more than your body needs on a consistent basis and you’ll get fatter.

BUT – we know that a calorie is NOT just a calorie and all calories are NOT created equal. Different macro- & micronutrients produce different long-term effects hormonally and metabolically.

This brings us to nutrient partitioning.

Nutrient Partitioning: Macronutrients Matter

Nutrient partitioning is another of those scientific sounding terms that a lot of folk use to make their theories for weight loss (not fat ahem…) sound more solid. Dr Scott Connelly the man who with Bill Phillips ‘created’ MetRX, was the first to use the term I supplement marketing. Now a lot of folk do.

This doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, or that it’s not rooted in solid science it is. Nutrient partitioning is regulated by a co-ordinated, multi-part symphony that consists of liver & gut action, brain & Central Nervous System (CNS), of muscle & fat tissues, of hormones & ion channels and more besides. Even now we are still not entirely sure of all of the components and exactly how nutrient partitioning works…But work it does.

The supplement that introduced the term 'Nutrient partitioning' into marketing speak...

More importantly we can make it work for us.

What is done with the food we eat by our bodies is a function of nutrient partitioning.

The calories we ingest are either burned for fuel, used for repair & growth or stored as energy for future use (yep – glycogen first then fat once the glycogen stores are full).

Naturally we’d want as much of the food we eat to be used as fuel for repair and lean tissue growth with as little as possible being stored as fat. Whether we are a week end athlete, a couch potato or a real athlete we all agree on one thing we want to eat our food with the absolute minimum stored as bodyfat.

So whilst you can’t destroy the energy we gain from food the macronutrients we ingest do matter and have an effect on nutrient partitioning. The question is how do we maximise the glycogen stores in our muscles & liver and minimise our fat stores whilst conditioning our metabolism to either maintain or gain lean muscular tissue?

Part of the answers lies in the fact that nutrient partitioning becomes less efficient, less effective the more insulin resistant that you become. In diabetics and the obsese nutrient partitioning is so out of shape that it becomes dysfunctional.

Insulin is enormously important in the actions of nutrient partitioning – the more insulin sensitive you are the better it works, the more that nutrients are partitioned & used by your body towards our muscle building, low fat storing goals. The more insulin resistant – the more fat you store as Nutrient partitioning twists out of true.

Insulin: Sensitive = Good, Resistant = Bad

You keep a knockin' but you can't come in - Insulin Resistance

We eat food and the carbs are broken down to glucose and absorbed by our blood stream. This gives our bodies an immediate and easy to access source of fuel. If the fuel is required it is burnt (via ATP synthesis) if not needed it is stored – both of these actions are controlled by Insulin.

Under insulin’s direction glucose is either stored as glycogen in the liver and muscle tissues, or it is converted to triglycerides and stored as body fat. That’s it, only 2 possibly outcomes.

Despite what we have read, and the fact that we want to max out glycogen storage and restrict fat storage – Insulin doesn’t care. Its action is constant – it gets out fat cells to be always taking up glucose. Once in the fat cell the glucose is transformed to fatty acids or glycerol both of which are needed to make up triglycerides. Which then get stored as fat.

So what?! you say – well this means that our bodies are ALWAYS storing fat after each & every meal. It sounds scarier than it is really is though…

The amount of fat stored under normal circumstances is under 15% because the lion’s share of the glucose (85 – 95%) is taken up & used by the muscles and as a part of body repair actions.

The key here is ‘under normal circumstances’…

Eat too many nutrient sparse, processed carbs and the whole glucose as our nutrient partitioning friend scenario alters radically. Too much available glucose means that the glycogen stores quickly fill up (their storage is limited) and the excess glucose is turned to fatty acids and then stored as triglycerides – you add fat. Speed is an issue here as well glycogen stores rapidly fill as they are the primary source of energy for our muscles and major organs like the liver. These stores can empty at a slower rate than they fill (although it is still quite quickly) even if we are out under sudden wide ranging stress, hit a hard exercise session etc. This emptying requires that more glucose be taken up to place what is used. Thing is if there is an excess of glucose in the blood stream and the just filled glycogen stores are not given a chance to empty then we

They don't come much more processed than this...

store it as fat.

Too much glucose in our blood stream is, ironically, poisonous – this is why insulin’s main purpose is to clear it from the blood through glycogen and / or fat storage. Our bodies are designed to constantly clear glucose from our blood streams. It does this by using insulin to interact with a specific receptor on fat cells that signals the fat cell to uptake the surplus glucose. This signal is sent once the glycogen stores are full.

Thing is – Insulin is just the messenger, the uptake of the glucose is controlled by a receptor. If your body has become insulin resistant the receptor ignores the insulin. But the glucose remains toxic so more insulin is released in quantities that force the receptors to allow the glucose & other nutrients to get into the cells.

Gain so what?! You say – well thing is a non-virtuous circle of feedback is created – the more insulin used to ‘pry’ open the cell receptors the more resistant to the actions of insulin they become so the more insulin is released…Even worse the insulin resistance in muscle & other tissues also rises meaning that the insulin sensitivity has decreased.

Normally this happens in these tissues when the glycogen stores are full, but with increased resistance mimicking the ‘full’ signal glycogen stores may not fully fill up falsely creating an excess of glucose in the blood stream which causes the dreaded insulin spike to get it cleared. Not only does insulin resistance cause you to get fat but it also robs your lean tissues and organs of a full complement of energy.

Consistently increased insulin levels also cause the metabolism to become “stuck” in its carbohydrate-burning mode. It does this by inhibiting the fat burning genes and by activating the carb metabolism ones. So your body develops a preference for carbs as all fuel and fat as little or none.

So we need to restore or at least improve our insulin sensitivity.

How to go about Improving Insulin Sensitivity

Good Carbs

Realise as a start that carbs are not bad, they’re not the enemy. Excess carbs, especially from highly processed nutrient sparse sources are.

Firstly watch what types of carbs you are eating. Again – you know the drill eat carbs from sources as unprocessed and as nutrient dense as possible. Next look at when you are eating you carbs. Aim to have about 30% of your daily intake at breakfast with a godly amount of lean protein.

Spread the other 70% over the day – again being aware of the source of them. If you are working out ensure that you have a decent ‘hit’ of carbs with protein in the hour after working out.

Look everyone’s metabolism and its needs are different – these are only rules of thumb – you have to see what works best for you. Main thing is to eat fibrous, unprocessed carbs mainly from fruit & vegetables and sparingly from grains. Eating this way will bolster your chances of nutrient partitioning working more for and less against you.

Remember that most folk have about 100 grams of glycogen in their liver and another 400-odd in their muscles. If you were to totally deplete these stores any amount of carbs over 500 grams not burned immediately for energy would be destined for fat storage.

So again try to limit your carb intake to avoid taking in an excessively high amount. Also again – check your sources of carbs – lean towards the fibrous, the unprocessed as much as possible.

What we really need is a way to improve our nutrient partition by increasing our insulin sensitivity, or by decreasing our insulin resistance.

Improving nutrient partitioning by combating insulin resistance

I have written before about the effect of whole body inflammation on metabolism, fat storage and heart disease. It should come as no surprise that by reducing any inflammation in the body we also improve our insulin sensitivity.

Look for oils that have a low Omega 6 and a high Omega 3 porofile

Leaving aside the cogent arguments of the Paleo folk regarding the inflammatory effects of grains, we know that a major cause of inflammation is the imbalance between Omega 3 & 6’s. Turns out that this imbalance is also a supporting factor for insulin resistance. High Omega 6’s means a higher than desirable level of inflammation regulators, whilst a high level of Omega 3 means higher levels of the anti-inflammatory ones. (we do need both but it is the ration that effects out sensitivity.)

A common denominator in obesity & diabetes (especially type II), is chronic inflammation of the cell membranes. This means that poor insulin sensitivity means you’ll gain fat, and that your ability to effectively partition nutrients will suffer.

Increasing your Omega 3 ratio is the easiest way to limit if not decrease inflammation and also improve your insulin sensitivity. Fish or Krill oil supplements, eating fatty deep sea fish and even supplementing with alpha-linolenic acid, an omega 3 fatty acid will all help.

Using olive, coconut or macadamia oils for cooking & dressings and cutting down as much as possible on ‘vegetable oils’ (seed oils really) like canola, safflower, peanut and blended oils will help also. All of these oils have a much higher level of Omega 6 than omega 3.

Now here is some concerning news – whereas fat tissue was once thought to be passive and largely inert, we now know that fat stores also have a function to control our whole body insulin sensitivity. Inflammatory responses in our body that cause insulin resistance & diabetes are in fact linked to our fat stores. The more of these you have the more likely it is that you will have insulin resistance and be at high risk of diabetes.

Fat it appears acts more as endocrine (hormone producing) organ, releasing hormone types called “adipokines.” It is these adipokines that control whole-body insulin sensitivity and inflammation. The famous hormone Leptin is an adipokine that is a strong nutrient partitioning agent that increases fat burning, decreases fat storage and improves insulin sensitivity.

Other adipokines work in the opposite direction. The way to influence which ones are produced is to up our Omega 3’s so the ‘good’ adipokines are released and the ‘bad’ ones are not..

Lastly – Don’t Stress!

This'll kill you - destress!!

Our insulin sensitivity falls off a cliff if we are under chronic, not acute stress. In these days of traffic jams, deadlines, taxes, poor economies etc etc it is hard to avoid experiencing at least some form of chronic stress.

Unchecked. Constant stress is a killer. It affects a plethora of body systems and erodes your health in numerous ways.

Learn to get enough sleep, exercise hard & regularly, enjoy regular sex, relax, do some meditating, choose who you spend time with and work at not worrying about the things outside of your control.

You’ll live longer, be happier and have much better insulin sensitivity…

See you next week – don’t forget to Tweet or face Book us!!

References

Kahn BB. Lilly lecture 1995. Glucose transport: pivotal step in insulin action. Diabetes 1996;45:1644-54.

Kahn SE, Hull RL, Utzschneider KM. Mechanisms linking obesity to insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes. Nature 2006;444:840-6.

SchutzY. Concept of fat balance in human obesity revisited with particular reference to de novo lipogenesis. Int J Obes Relat Metab Disord 2004;28 Suppl 4:S3-S11.

Schwarz JM, Linfoot P, Dare D, Aghajanian K. Hepatic de novo lipogenesis in normoinsulinemic and hyperinsulinemic subjects consuming high-fat, low-carbohydrate and low-fat, high-carbohydrate isoenergetic diets. The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 2003;77:43-50.

Parks EJ. Dietary carbohydrate’s effects on lipogenesis and the relationship of lipogenesis to blood insulin and glucose concentrations. Br J Nutr 2002;87 Suppl 2:S247-S253.

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Fat Loss, Pain & Metabolism

Posted on October 8, 2011 by jghethe

Welcome back!

If you’re a regular reader of this blog then it’s a sure bet that you are either looking to take back control of your body or are at least pursuing a leaner, more toned body.

It also means that you know that I believe that reconditioning or at least elevating your metabolism is the keyto achieving this.

Body Weight works well...

There are many definitions of metabolism the one I like is: “Metabolism is the set of chemical reactions that happen in living organisms to sustain life.”

However if you are carrying too much body fat, or want to develop more muscle and become stronger and fitter, not to mention healthier – then simply sustaining life isn’t the goal to aim for. Just surviving shouldn’t be your standard. Changing how you look & feel, what you eat, how (& how often) you move basically moving past mere survival towards thriving, growing, exceeding, and surpassing – this is a worthy goal.

It is in fact a life goal.

Becoming fitter & leaner is as simple (& as complex) as the fact that the higher level your metabolism functions, the better become your results as far as fat loss and maintaining a slim, trim body. Notice I didn’t say the more efficient your metabolism becomes…(although it will of course do so)…in many ways we want our metabolism to stay somewhat irregular because once your body become efficient at anything homeostasis sets in and your body fights against change…

It is better to think in terms of elevating your metabolism by manipulating the components of it that we can exert influence over. Of course once you’ve achieved your desired fat loss / lean body then keep doing what got you there and create a new metabolic set point – this way you co-opt your body’s desire for homeostasis to work for your goal, not against it…

Metabolism is complex (& simple)

So let’s revisit some of the strategies that you can utilise to make your metabolism work at a higher rate for you…

Human metabolism can be broadly broken down into two parts: catabolism and anabolism. Catabolism is concerned with tearing things down – it is the burning of calories, the digestion of food, the breaking down of body tissues for energy or as a precursor to rebuilding (think sore muscles after a hard work out – for the sake of simplicity the muscle soreness you feel is associated with catabolic processes). It is essential the processes whereby your body fuels your cells with energy by breaking down available fuel sources.

Without the catabolic part of metabolism we would not have the energy to provide the energy to our muscles that is needed to stand, sit, move, breathe and generally create movement. It is often talked about in a negative sense but without catabolism we would just be inert sacks of chemicals & minerals.

The other side of this simplified metabolic coin is Anabolism. The anabolic side of the equation is the building part of our metabolism. Cell repair, muscle, hair, & nail growth are all anabolic processes. Basically anabolism takes energy and uses it to link / bind chemical compounds together to make larger molecules & cells.

In order to use these processes in your quest to become less fat, stronger & healthier you need to maximise both of them. For catabolism this means challenging, regular exercise that causes your muscles & other energy pathways to burn fuel like fat, carbohydrates, and sugars. For anabolism it too means challenging exercise coupled with protein and nutrient rich foods. The more intensely that you

Tabata protocol using KBs works both sets of muscles & burns fat...

train the more your metabolism elevates and more opportunities your body gains to shed fat and gain lean mass.

As we’ve seen intense training is not long duration training and more importantly training that uses protocols like Tabatas or HIIT tend to work a lot of muscles – and this is important for overall fitness, well being and fat loss.

Muscles are the furnaces that burn fat in your body. Muscles are numerous and together they have 2 general roles to play – mobility & stability. You know by now my preference for whole body workouts that use compound movements. Compound movements are important because they not only use the large muscles but they also activate and exercise the stabilising muscles. Stabilising muscles are an often overlooked component of movement & fat loss.

The larger muscles (think quadriceps, deltoids, pecs & lats) are called ‘prime movers’ and allow your body to move with what is called ‘Dynamic Mobility’– which is another way of saying through a full range of motion.

The stabilising muscles tend to be smaller, less obvious (even when developed) and lie deeper in the body & closer to the joints. Their role is to do as their name suggests – to stabilise. Stabiliser muscles like your shoulders rotator cuff, like your deep abdominals, like your infraspinitus and spinal multifidi all work to keep our bodies ‘together’ whilst it moves. Whether walking, pitching a ball, skiing a slope or sitting in a meal these muscles stop the actions of the prime movers from pulling us apart as we move dynamically. They are in use all of the time and as such are major (but oft times unsung) users of energy.

Working both types of muscles is important for another reason – if the Prime Movers become too strong &

Stress releases cortisol - belly fat anyone!!??

overwhelm the stabilising muscles then we begin to collect injuries – often chronic ones. Or if the stabilisers become weak then the Prime Movers have to pull ‘double duty’ and act not just as movers but also as stabilisers. This type of overload can lead to joint dysfunction and pain. Note I mean pain, not the soreness that accompanies a good workout, but deep lasting hurt!

Pain is read by your body as a source of stress and causes it to release stress hormones like cortisol which not only blunts anabolic metabolism but also directs fat storage to the belly area.

Chronic muscle imbalance = Pain = more belly fat.

So in order to avoid this you’ve got to move often, move intensely, & move well. This means using compound movements (think Olympic style lifts) with activities like sprinting and walking.

To get the most out of your metabolism, both in terms of catabolism & anabolism your training should involve training intensely in a way that is without pain. Chronic Pain will constantly undermine the effectiveness of your workouts and pull your metabolic levels down.

See you next week.

Fructose, but not glucose, knocks your metabolism backwards!!

Posted on October 1, 2011 by jghethe

Welcome back – A short sharp post this week…

Glucose & fructose are both types of sugar and they are both the ones most often mentioned in a negative health context. Fructose, particularly in the form of High Fructose Corn Syrup, continues to gain a (deservedly in my opinion) reputation in both nutruitional & medical circles.

Brown suagr - just one of the many forms of this carb that abound in our diets...

It has been linked in numerous (and a growing number of) studies with a wide range of preventative illnesses. Obesity, type 2 diabetes, increased whole body inflammation, deranged insulin processing, altered liver function, increased risk of heart disease and is now being considered an adictive substance.

A recent study . namely: Cox CL, et al.Consumption of fructose-sweetened beverages for 10 weeks reduces net fat oxidation and energy expenditure in overweight/obese men and women. (Advance online publication European Journal of Clinical Nutrition on 28 September 2011)

In this study glucose & fructose were lined up head to head for 10 weeks. Overweight and obese men and women were fed glucose or fructose sweetened drinks for this time period. The sugar content was designed to represent 25% of the daily energy requirements of these folk. (If they normally eat 2400 calories a day then the sugar content was 600 calories – about over 150grams.

Whilst there were a whole lot of measurements were taken of the participants the two of real interest to us are: Metabolism after eating (measured fat oxidation) and measuring theiur BMR (basal or ‘at rest’ metabolic rate)

The resulting measurement of these two areas showed that the consumption of high amounts of fructose (let’s face 25% of your daily calroes as fructose, or glucose or any other sugar IS a lit!) led to significant reductions in both measures. Inother words it slowed down the participants metabolisms both after eating (where you would expect in usual circumstances at lease a small spike upwards due to the Thermic effect of food) and at reast. Don’t forget we burn most of our calories at rest.

Fructose in fruit = good, as corn syrup = BAD!!

What was surprising was that these reductions were not seen with the same level of glucose consumption. Based on this it would be correct to assusme that on a gram for gram basis, fructose carries a much larger potential for adding fat to your body than does glucose.

So what do we conclude from this? That glucose is good & fructose is bad? That we should therfore eat glucose laden foods with abandon and at the same time forgo all fruit?

No. The amounts of sugars in this experiment were large and hopefully way above anything you or your loved ones consume. What this does show though is that high amounts of fructose can harm health, and can be viewed as being more damaging than glucose.

So still eat fruit but cut down on if not entirely eleiminate ay processed food with Fructose (especially in the HFCS form) to protect your health & stay a bit leaner.