I posted a blog a while ago about diets. I talked briefly about a calorie restriction diet when I mentioned an article, “Study Finds Low-Calorie Diet Extends Lifespan of Monkeys“.

Here’s some more. The New York Times posted an article about a recent study:

…[the study] is investigating how (and if) a spartan diet affects the aging process and its associated diseases. To the [study] researchers, these are quite distinct. The aging process, which researchers sometimes call “primary” or “intrinsic” aging, refers to the damage that ordinarily accumulates in our cells as we grow older, a natural condition that seems to have limited the maximal lifespan of humans to 120 years. Diseases that accompany the aging process — often called “secondary aging” — are those afflictions increasingly prevalent in the elderly, like cancer, diabetes and cardiovascular disease.
[...]
In a study on rats, [researchers] compared animals that were lean because of exercise with those that were equally lean from calorie restriction. “Both had an increase in average life span,” Fontana said, but only calorie restriction was able to slow down aging and increase maximal life span. That suggested that “leanness” was not in and of itself determining the rate of aging. “Speaking of humans,” Fontana added, “if you are lean because you are exercising, of course you are doing good, because you’re preventing types of diabetes, some kinds of cardiovascular disease and maybe some types of cancers. But the data suggest that calorie restriction is more powerful. And the people on C.R. are more powerfully protected from diseases than the exercisers.”

Some more excerpts from “The Calorie-Restriction Experiment“:

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From “Don’t Believe Women’s Weight-Lifting Myths“:

Strength training, along with a healthy diet and regular cardio exercise, is one of the best things women can do to maintain metabolism and keep their arms looking great. Despite popular belief, lifting weights does not make most women look masculine and bulky. Since women naturally have less of the hormone testosterone, an essential hormone for increasing muscle size, they do not gain muscle in the same way as men. Of course, women who want to can get very large muscles. But women who compete in body building competitions train for hours a day and utilize supplements to enhance their muscle mass. Women who follow a basic strength training regimen will not develop muscle in a similar fashion.

I’m not quite sure why or when this started, but there’s been a lot of talk about Michelle Obama’s “toned arms”. Not sure why…

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Really interesting article from TimesOnline, “How cooking helped us to evolve“:

“It’s hard for us to understand the importance of food because, for us, food is easy,” Wrangham says. “We can buy it and we can get preprepared meals. This is not the case for the majority of the world. In some societies, it really matters to a husband that he can come back to a meal cooked by his wife.

Not that Wrangham’s wife cooks: “We’re housemasters for a Harvard college, so we hardly ever cook. We eat with the students most nights. I’ve often looked at them and wondered whether I should be studying them, as well as the chimpanzees. We’ve come to see food as a way to explore pleasure, as cuisine, to be enjoyed. That’s not how our ancestors saw it. For them, food was a way to survive and have babies.”

His theory that we are the cooking ape, knocks the stuffing out of the raw food movement, which claims uncooked or lightly prepared food to be more natural. But neither history, nor science testifies to the naturalness, for humans, of a raw food diet. Survivors of disasters who get by on raw food invariably show signs of starvation when rescued.

The Giessen Raw Food study, conducted by German nutritionists in 2005, studied more than 500 people who ate a diet that was 70 to 100 per cent raw (vegetables, fruits, cold-pressed oil and honey, plus dried fruits, meat and fish). All the raw-foodists lost weight, sometimes dramatically; the scientists concluded that “a raw diet cannot guarantee an adequate energy supply”. And this in the well-fed West, where the supermarket rather than the forest floor is our larder. Our ancestors would surely have suffered more parlously.

But most damning of all was the finding that many women on the study stopped menstruating. Others saw their cycles become irregular. Conception and pregnancy — that most natural of biological processes — would be a rare feat on an uncooked diet. Wrangham’s message is clear: “I’m impressed by its potential to be a healthy diet but we must be aware of its limitations. I’m amazed at the willpower of some raw foodists but some are deluded; they are wrong about it being natural. If you are cast away on a desert island and you say, ‘I won’t bother cooking’, you will die.”

I plan on amending this post later on about dieting and the raw food diet. Stay tuned!

On my next health post (remember my coffee one?), I’m going to rant about food and diets.

Remember this thing? It’s the Food Pyramid.

Well, that’s gone now.

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Along the lines of the Shake Weight, this is 100% bullshit:

1. Protein and creatine is for muscle growth. However, both are useless without weight training.
2. This ad leads to a site which sells a “health” book. So it’s not free.
3. Getting “ripped” means reducing your body fat which becomes exponentially more difficult as you reach the lower percentages. Good luck doing that without “killing yourself in the gym or dieting.”
4. The ad leads to a site and blog which encourages “free” exercises by doing body weight exercises. You will not look like this dude with body weight exercises. Even with steroids.
5. This dude is not indicative of the results from the advertised methods.

This ad is just trying to prey on the whole economy-is-in-the-shitter situation. Everything about it is a lie.

I’m in the process of writing an epic post on health. A lot of ideas are starting to come to mind, but trying to organize one good post is turning out difficult.

I’ve decided to post bits and pieces and then tie it all together. For now, I’m gonna talk about a subtopic(food) in this post, specifically coffee. Ironically, yes, I am drinking coffee as I write this post.

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Taken from The New York Times, via Yahoo News:

THIS summer the unvarying male uniform in the precincts of Brooklyn cool has been a pair of shorts cut at knickers length, a V-neck Hanes T-shirt, a pair of generic slip-on sneakers and a straw fedora. Add a leather cuff bracelet if the coolster is gay.

In truth this get-up was pretty much the unvarying male uniform last summer also, but this year an unexpected element has been added to the look, and that is a burgeoning potbelly one might term the Ralph Kramden.

Too pronounced to be blamed on the slouchy cut of a T-shirt, too modest in size to be termed a proper beer gut, developed too young to come under the heading of a paunch, the Ralph Kramden is everywhere to be seen lately, or at least it is in the vicinity of the Brooklyn Flea in Fort Greene, the McCarren Park Greenmarket and pretty much any place one is apt to encounter fans of Grizzly Bear.

What the trucker cap and wallet chain were to hipsters of a moment ago, the Kramden is to what my colleague Mike Albo refers to as the “coolios” of now. Leading with a belly is a male privilege of long standing, of course, a symbol of prosperity in most cultures and of freedom from anxieties about body image that have plagued women since Eve.
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There’s been a lot of rage brewing over a recent Time article, “Why Exercise Won’t Make You Thin“. Here’s an excerpt:

“In general, for weight loss, exercise is pretty useless,” says Eric Ravussin, chair in diabetes and metabolism at Louisiana State University and a prominent exercise researcher. Many recent studies have found that exercise isn’t as important in helping people lose weight as you hear so regularly in gym advertisements or on shows like The Biggest Loser — or, for that matter, from magazines like this one.

The basic problem is that while it’s true that exercise burns calories and that you must burn calories to lose weight, exercise has another effect: it can stimulate hunger. That causes us to eat more, which in turn can negate the weight-loss benefits we just accrued. Exercise, in other words, isn’t necessarily helping us lose weight. It may even be making it harder.

Thoughts? Opinions?

I’d like to just reiterate that nobody knows anything about health.

From “New development builds ripped muscles legally”

Researchers in New Jersey have developed an effective, healthy and legal alternative to steroids. The weekly parade of amateur and professional athletes being exposed for using steroids may be a thing of the past.
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To develop a healthier approach to “being ripped,” a creative team, led by Dr. Robert Shorr, recognized that accelerating the stem cell activity and sleep were equally important parts of fitness. They also formulated compounds to address the aggregate interaction and synergy of all-natural proteins, enzymes and amino acids, including a stem cell agonist, a trace mineral called indium and components to support natural, non habit-forming sleep processes

The core muscle building component, “eggplant extract,” is a natural dietary adult stem cell agonist. The eggplant extract quickly goes to work recruiting the sleeping adult stem cells in bone marrow and starts repairing the micro-tears and building new muscle. It is that combination of elements and interactions that works like magic, for the ultimate easy and safe results we each want, need and deserve.

Oh great, another extract, another supplement, another vitamin. Maybe this one will replace the “omega fatty acid” fad, which replaced the vitamin “C” fad.

OH GOD IT NEVER ENDS.