Category: Health

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Books Health

Unseen Boneyards

There’re unseen boneyards out there containing the people who didn’t survive situations that favored other people. Since we usually only see the people who make it through and not the ones who don’t, there’s a tendency to think the process (or activity) is producing or causing a result – when it’s really also favoring certain individuals over others.

For instance, swimming competitions favor certain types of bodies that are the most efficient for a certain event. By the time you see the last heat of an olympic swim race most of the racers look pretty much the same. So you might think “If I swim a lot I can look like Micheal Phelps because he swims a lot.” He does swim a lot. But so did lots of other kids who didn’t thrive in the pool but swam a lot. And so you wind up only seeing the “cream of the crop” when you’re watching the olympics and none of the shorter, stouter kids who maybe swam as much and were as enthusiastic but never wound up with a “swimmer’s body.” That shorter, stouter swimmer is part of an unseen boneyard of swimming.

When Arnold Schwarzenegger claimed he ate a particular supplement or did a particular exercise in a novel way, we tend to think that’s what makes him a champion bodybuilder. He had the genes and drive (and steroids) that allowed him to respond to a high volume of training that put other people in an unseen bodybuilding boneyard. I think he’d have done just as well missing a supplement or not doing curls using a barbell with a special shape.

Or consider the training Navy SEALS aspirants go through before graduating. The majority of the guys who try don’t make it. While the program they endure is tough, the ones that make it through are really more genetically suited to that workload. Most people who tryout will wind up in a SEAL boneyard that we never see. It’s important to realize that there’s a selection process going on that favors a certain set of genes – it’s not just the training.

One of my nephews, Ben, is a high school senior who’s keen to play college football. About a month ago, he injured his knee playing basketball and is rehabbing it. He’s still planning on playing football, but he’s in a boneyard at the moment. While looking for some  helpful info for him, I came across this talk by Doug McGuff, MD. Doug’s one of the sharpest guys in the health and fitness area. He has a good book, that I read about a year ago, called “Body By Science.” He discusses the boneyard idea in regards to workouts, basically saying that your workout should minimize any chances of winding up in a boneyard by overtraining or training in a potentially dangerous way.

About auto racing, someone said that to finish first, you first have to finish. If you wind up in a boneyard, you won’t finish. So take care in choosing the activity you want to pursue by checking out its boneyard as well as the folks at the top of the heap. Did they make it to the top because of what they do or despite what they do?

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Books Food and Drink Health

Eating Way Back

Stylewise, where on the timeline of human existence are you eating? I came across this diagram and think it’s great distillation of what lots of people are trying to figure out about their health.

Conventional wisdom, more and more, is finding fault with industrial, modern foods like Twinkies, 20 ounce servings of sodas, and trans fats and so conventional wisdom advocates eating in ways similar to our great-grandparents’ style, featuring whole grains, beans, etc. That’s a big improvement and you’ll probably get healthier because you’ll be avoiding industrial and processed foods. In the diagram above that’s going from the red area backwards into the yellow area.

But, the diagram isn’t to scale. The green area representing most of mankind’s existence should be 200 times(!) longer than the yellow. Most of our genetic make up has evolved accommodating the foods we encountered for a couple of million years. During that time as hunter-gatherers, before agriculture, we wouldn’t have been eating much in the way of grains, legumes, and sweets. And there’d have been zero processed foods.

Like most Americans, I drank the low-fat Kool-aid. After a while though, cracks started appearing. There’s the growing obesity problem that started taking off in the 80’s. And people seem to be getting unhealthier every year.

Several years ago I noticed the a low-carb resurgence. Then I read some of the early Paleo literature from Loren Cordain,Ph.D. which was intriguing but I wasn’t convinced.  And then a few years ago I heard an NPR interview with Gary Taubes about what his investigations indicated. But It wasn’t until I read Taubes’  “Good Calories Bad Calories” a couple of years ago, that I really came around to re-evaluate the standard American diet.

Gary Taubes is a top science writer at the New York Times. The book isn’t a breezy read. It’s the nature of the material combined with the thoroughness needed to challenge the accepted wisdom. But it’s worth the read if you want to dig deep. Fortunately, Taubes has just come out with the more accessible “Why We Get Fat.” One of the main ideas is that easily digested sugars drive insulin secretion in our bodies. Insulin then signals our bodies to store excess sugar as fat. Taubes says obesity is not a disease of overeating but a disease of fat storage, insightful but hard to wrap your head around.

For a couple of million years we usually didn’t have easy access to simple sugars and grains. Our bodies and big brains are fueled by sugar (glucose), so we crave it. But it wasn’t until the past few generations that easily digestible sugars became such a dominant part of our diet. We should be following the “smart money” arrow above all the way back to the green, hunter-gatherer area of the diagram. I’m not saying to re-enact the way we once lived as hunter-gatherers. Instead we need to learn what it is we’ve evolved to eat. Because you’re not what you eat; you’re what your DNA does with what you eat (to paraphrase Art DeVany).

It can’t be worse than current situation. If you go to a public space, it’s easier to see unhealthy folks than to spot healthy ones, which seems to be the opposite of the way it should be.

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Health Ideas

Stronger Societies

The recent upheaval in Egypt and the rumblings in other Arab countries reminded me of an interesting interview I heard with two professors of epidemiology. These two British scientists have studied how income inequality hurts societies and affects the health of nations. They also have a book out.

Normally, epidemiologists work at understanding and reducing public health risks. They look for patterns of disease and work at identifying the factors causing disease or injury. Epidemiologists usually are thought of focusing on viruses like the bird flu or the H1N1. But for this study they looked at the health and well-being of the citizens of the top 25 wealthiest countries.

Some of the categories investigated were feelings of trust towards their fellow countrymen, violence, unplanned pregnancies, life expectancy, and well-being. Raising incomes and material standards of living is known to increase the quality of life for people, but after a certain point (in the US it’s an income of around $50,000 a year) the major gains hit a point of diminishing returns.

The findings claim that health is strongly protected by friendship and is damaged by low social status. As the difference between the richest and the poorest people in a country grows so do the health and well-being of the citizenry. More income equity, they claim, makes societies stronger. And it all seems to stem from the feeling of low status that results from large income inequalities.

They also claim the way a lower income inequality is achieved doesn’t seem to matter. In the US for instance, Vermont and New Hampshire both have low income inequality rates. In New Hampshire this results from a smaller difference in earnings between the highest and lowest paid; while in Vermont, higher tax rates on higher earners is the cause of the lower income inequality rate. But both states rate high on the areas investigated. On the level of countries, the results are the same! Japan is similar to New Hampshire and Sweden is like a large Vermont when it comes to how income inequality is addressed.

The findings of the epidemiologists is not accepted in all quarters, but enough people are convinced that it was in the mix at the recent Davos meeting of world political and business leaders. Decision makers and planners can’t try to effectively get to where they want to be unless they’re able to see the world as it is and why it is the way it is. This might help provide part of the map that leaders need to help find the way for people to have better lives.

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Health

Healing Speed

My girlfriend and I just went to an introductory Capoiera class on Tuesday night. It turned out to be interesting and fun; and we’ll probably go again. Because it was the first class after the holiday season, all of the levels were mixed together, I guess it was meant as a “get back into it” class. That mix of skill levels together with a blend of Spanish, bits of Portuguese and African made for an exotic and at times confusing class.

The class was attended by 15 people in a large old warehouse a with rough concrete floor. Capoiera has music and singing involved that keeps the action flowing. Everyone is barefoot and there’s lots of hand clapping to the beats too. So the whole experience was absorbing. I didn’t notice the roughness of the floor because I go around barefoot much of the time and the bottoms of my feet are fairly tough. My girlfriend doesn’t share my interest in barefoot locomotion and wound up with two big blood blisters on the soles of her feet.

That’s what got me thinking about injuries. A doctor once told me that maybe 80% of patients he saw would (did) get better on their own without his help. Of course, he’s able to assess the problem for them and help them to manage it; but if they hadn’t seen him they’d still get better most of time.

With that in mind, here’s something I’ve eventually figured out: don’t continually test your ailment. You know what I mean; you keep checking it out by bending a sore joint, picking at a scab, or poking at a sore muscle. You’re probably just slowing down the healing process.

We always want to return to the way we were before an injury. But don’t keep testing the situation. It’ll get better faster without your interference. It’s just my observation. I’m not talking about health problems that do need outside attention. But probably those too.

After class when we returned home and tidied up her wounds. They were scrubbed clean and had Neosporin applied before putting socks on both her feet.

It’s tempting to keep checking on the progress. But if we stop testing her broken blisters and she can wear shoes for a few classes, she’ll be back to barefoot Capoiera soon.

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Health Stories

Pearls

Someone recently recalled for me an interesting speech given by a successful screenwriter. He said earlier in life he’d attended top schools and eventually became a lawyer at a prestigious firm, but didn’t become a partner. This failure to make partner pushed him into a depression which lead him to seeking help from a shrink.

There was one piece of advice helped him more than anything else. Here’s the idea from the shrink that really helped him: “Life isn’t about going after one pearl. In a lifetime there’re many pearls to be had, all adding to a necklace rather than seeking just one prized pearl.”  The failed lawyer said this piece of advice steered him in the direction to eventually become a very successful screenwriter. He had sought after and paid for help from an advice professional.

The advice he got helped to turn his life around. The chances of getting good advice from a shrink are high, after all they train for years and (we expect) they’re both smart and insightful.

But could the screenwriter have gotten similar, useful advice from a friend or colleague? Maybe. Did he ask for it? Probably not. People with good advice usually wait for someone to ask for help first – they know that unsolicited advice won’t be valued or used. I’m not at all against going to a shrink for help. Since you’re both asking and paying for it, the shrink will have your attention.

There’re situations in life that lend themselves to talk – a long train ride, an afternoon in a coffee shop, or maybe a morning walk in a park. These are examples of times in busy lives when people can talk long enough to present a problem and receive an answer. But help has to be asked for. By asking for help you’re placing yourself in a receptive position for advice.

If the advice rings true it could even be effective. Whether it’s bought or freely given, if the advice is good you’ll be glad that you asked for it.

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Health Things

Falling Coconuts

There’s a concept you’ll hear about in the tropics. It’s that more people are killed each year by falling coconuts than are killed by sharks. The concept is probably unverifiable since reporting and record keeping is not always practiced in places with lots of coconut palms. I’ve also heard that it’s just an urban myth that has made its way to the beach.

The number of deaths attributed to falling coconuts that I’ve heard most often is 150. If it is a common cause of death, I think that number is low. The latitude range where coconuts grow is large and more people live in warmer climates. So if people are being hit by coconuts, it seems to me that there’d be more than 150.

A few days ago I was on the street in front of our house giving the car its semi-annual washing. While in the middle of the washing, I was startled by a loud but dull thud. I looked around and on the sidewalk across the street a large coconut was slowly rocking back and forth as its milk oozed onto the pavement. No harm no foul.

I didn’t see it fall but I didn’t need to in order say that it probably could kill you; certainly a kid or dog would’ve been killed by a direct hit. The coconut fell from the palm in the photo above. Later in the day when I tracked down our camera and went across the street to shoot the fallen coconut; it was gone. But you can imagine from the palm photo what a potentially deadly projectile a coconut from a tall palm could be.

Mexico has been getting some bad press over the last couple of years. We don’t have any problems here with any of the stuff you hear about in the news. But I’m keeping my eye out for coconut palms.

Categories
Exercise Health Ideas Time Savers

EVERYTHING I KNOW I LEARNED IN PRISON

That’s what it said on a bumper sticker on the car in front of me. I’ve never been in prison and hope I can always say that. But it’s a funny sticker.

I’m sure there’re some clever people locked up, and they have lots of time to kill. And prisons seem like they have a “survival of the fittest” thing going, right?

If you were in a restricted space with no access to a gym, eventually the best exercise for those circumstances bubbles up to the surface. The knowledge would be passed along from prisoner to prisoner and refined along the way. So workouts would have been through many iterations of lots of different exercises to arrive at something that’s the most effective. I can’t be sure it’s true; but there’s an exercise that supposedly comes out of the prison experience.

The exercise is called a Burpee pushup. It’s an exercise I do and like. With Burpee pushups you’ll really get the most bang for your buck. It’s an especially effective exercise to do if (unlike a prisoner) you don’t have much time or (like a prisoner) have a limited space. Say you’re traveling, staying in a hotel room and don’t have much time before a meeting. Do some Burpee pushups in your room, take a shower, and scoot off to your meeting, all in a very short time. Of course, they’re great to do at home too.

Here’s how they’re done. Drop down into the starting position for a pushup. Do a pushup. At the top of the pushup when your arms are straightening, jump your feet forward so your knees are at your chest and you’re in a crouching position. Then leap up, reaching for the ceiling with you hands. As you land, bend over, put your hands on the floor and pop your feet back so you’re in the starting  position for a pushup again. That’s one rep.

If you’d like, you can find videos of Burpee pushups on YouTube. Here’s one I like.

How many to do? Well, this is what I’d recommend and how many I do. Usually twenty one. But not all at once. I do only one at first; then I wait one minute; and then I do two; wait one minute then do three … and follow this pattern. I usually stop after the sixth minute/sixth set, which would at this point, have me doing six Burpee pushups during the last set. Adding up all six sets we have: 1+2+3+4+5+6=21. Twenty one reps of a hard exercise in six minutes and I’m done!

The other nice thing about doing it this way is you get a warm-up in there too. Sure, you can do more than one, but start with just one and go through adding a rep to each set.

This pattern of the rep number equaling the set number is called a “ladder.”  You can scale it up or down to suit your situation; and you can use it for other exercises too.

I have a feel for the time now but I usually use a cool little interval timer called the Gym Boss. It’s cheap, $20, easy to use, and keeps you honest. Of course you can use a watch or maybe a kitchen timer. The GymBoss is just easy and you can set any interval time you wish to use. Plus, it counts the number of intervals for you too. Just do your workout and listen for the beeps (it has a vibrate mode too in case you’re stealthy or in a loud area). Side note: An interval timer is handy for other exercises too because you can work out for timed sets, which is a more effective method.

At first, start out doing a couple of minutes worth and work up to six (or more) minutes. Don’t over do it and you’ll keep it up. Burpee pushups are a really good, quick, and surprisingly effective exercise.

Categories
Health Things Time Savers

What? An Electric Toothbrush?

I visited Africa once and saw Kenyans in the bush massaging their teeth with small twigs. I asked a guy about it and he said they use a twig from the olivewood tree as a toothbrush. Their teeth looked pretty good. I tried it and it seemed to work well enough. But an olivewood twig is tough to come by in these parts. Also, it could’ve just been they weren’t eating lots of sweets.

Enter the electric toothbrush.

When I first heard about it I thought what could be more bourgeois and useless. Was it like the electric carving knife of personal hygiene? I mean, how difficult could it possibly be to slice a turkey? And you only need to do it twice a year, tops.

The concept of an electric toothbrush reminded me of Canadian columnist, Heather Mallick, commenting  that “… the (increasing number of) devices have one aim: to make even the smallest movement unnecessary.”

Then I was given an electric toothbrush many years ago as a gift… Jesus, an electric toothbrush! What’s next the AAA battery-powered toothpick?

But I have to cowboy up and admit I was wrong. I tried it and it worked much better than manual brushing and I grew to enjoy using it. Plus I cut back on dentist visits since my teeth and gums became healthier.

I’m still using an electric toothbrush. As a mater of fact I’ve gone through two of ’em over the years and am now onto my third. I use it at least twice a day. It’s not because I’m too lazy to  manually brush. Actually, I used be a religious little brusher for years before switching over. And when I travel, it’s back to manual, it’s like riding a bicycle, you won’t forget how to do it.

The picture on this post is of my friend Chris who was visiting us in Mexico. After getting ready for a party he decided to brush his teeth before heading out. As you can see, he likes his electric toothbrush so much he even travels with his.

So you never know.

Bob Dylan went electric back in the Sixties and his music changed for the better. I went electric in the nineties and my teeth are whiter and stronger.

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Exercise Food Food and Drink Health Ideas Opinion People

George Clooney Spans A Lot of Time

This is going to be tough, to distill “paleo” into a short pithy post, but I’ll try.

Take George Clooney. If he spread his arms out wide, they’d span about six feet. Now, imagine his outstretched  arms representing the two or so million years humans have been around. With that in mind, the time since we started farming is represented by less than the length of his middle fingernail. So most of his six foot arm span is the time we were foraging for food. We’ve been hunter-gathers for most of our time since leaving the trees.

It’s estimated we’ve changed (genetically speaking) less than one percent since farming started around ten thousand years ago. That’s not much change. During all that time before farming started our bodies became fine tuned to what was provided by living as hunter-gathers.

For food, we would have sought out but rarely found much in the way of sweets, instead we ate animals, fish, leafy vegetable, berries and some fare like bugs and grubs that grosses most of us out . We aren’t adapted yet to thrive on our current diet of simple sugars, grains and dairy.

Currently, with our incredible successes as farmers, grains and simple sugars are cheap and widespread, fueling humans around the world. We’re like diesel engines supplied by fuel tanks of gasoline. We might occasionally add a quart of oil to the gasoline to make the fuel a little more compatible, but the little diesel engines aren’t running too well.

Apparently, preagricultural humans were felled by childbirth, infection and traumatic injury. And the ones who dodged those bullets, were taller, stronger and longer lived than our more recent ancestors who became farmers. Hunter-gathers didn’t suffer much from the diseases of civilization like obesity, heart problems and the cancers affecting us now.

Every account I’ve seen of healthy native populations encountering and then embracing a western style diet soon fell prey to the same constellation of ailments associated with the more technologically advanced population who introduced the refined diet to them.

This is a broad area to look at. But there’s good reason to do so. And most people looking at how our ancestors lived come away with insights on how to improve their lives today, and not by picking up a spear and eating grubs.

This is about the clues to the environment humans adapted to over the millenia. Look at “The Black Swan” author, Nassim Taleb, he’s erudite and urbane, spending his time (away from the outdoors) in cities around the world. But by paying attention to these clues from our ancestors he’s able to better live in his modern world. Wealthy enough to do as he pleases and travel often, he says “I was able to re-create 90 percent of the benefits of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle with minimal effort, without compromising a modern lifestyle, in the aesthetics of an urban setting.”

This is a broad area for investigation. Humans are tool users and seem to not like rules. So here are a some of the take-away tools I think are useful:

Avoid sugars and grains and embrace meat, fish, leafy vegetables, berries and nuts. Skip meals sometimes. Sleep longer, in complete darkness. Become an occasional sprinter instead of jogging regularly. Get a little sun. Walk a lot. And finally, randomly do some brief but very intense exercise.

Here’re a few places to start looking if you want more information:

PaNu –  the site of a board certified MD with his thoughts about Paleolithic nutrition and modern life, a very good source to start with. He’s a busy guy, so his site is not updated very often but that’s ok.

Mark’s Daily Apple – this site serves up good solid information, but with distracting contests and self promotions.

Evfit – an old school website layout but chock full of good information.

This is a big subject I’ll revisit in later posts, I hope this was a useful introduction for you.

Categories
Exercise Health Ideas Simplifing Sites tools

Useful Exercise

This is my first post about exercise. I’m only going to be presenting exercises I do and have found to be worthwhile.

But here’s the thing – the best exercise is, really, the one you like to do and that you’ll do (consistently). I’m starting out with an exercise that I think is useful and fun.

OK, there’re people exclusively doing  just this exercise and getting good results. I like it because it’s easy, quick, cheap, and leaves you prepared for real world activities like shoveling your driveway. All you really need is a sledgehammer. That’s right, a sledgehammer.

If you don’t have one, you can buy one easily enough. Better, borrow one from a neighbor who has lots of tools. A sledgehammer is a tool most people don’t use very often and so your neighbor probably won’t mind lending it to you to try this out.

Commonly, sledgehammers have heads ranging from eight to twelve pounds. Err on the light side. Eight or ten pounds is plenty. The ten pounder I use is pictured above. I painted bands on the handle so I could easily put my hands in the same position when switching sides.

Before I get to the particulars, I want to say I also like the way sledgehammers look and since they stand on their head with the handle up – they have a small footprint. So, in your office, spare bedroom, or garage it can be set in the corner when not in use; it looks cool and is easy to grab for a little workout. Of course it easily lives in a closet too.

The site shovelglove is the site I credit with putting me onto using a sledgehammer for exercise. Shovelglove’s Reinhard Engels says the genesis of using a sledgehammer workout began with this memory: “I remembered reading something in some French novel about coal shovelers having the best abdominal muscles of anyone the author had ever seen.”

His workouts consist of a 14 minute (timed) session Monday through Friday during which he uses his sledgehammer to mimic shoveling, paddling, hammering, and butter churning motions to name a few. You can make up your own motions. Do it on both right and left sides. And you’re done in less than 15 minutes which he sees as the shortest normally scheduled chunk of time. Checkout the shovelglove site to see videos.

You can listen to music, watch TV, wear whatever you like, and you’re done in a short time.

I use the sledgehammer this way too. But I enjoy other types of exercise (Engels doesn’t) so to be transparent, I want to say I use a sledgehammer workout to augment other exercises. For me, it’s part of a mix. But I think as a stand alone routine it’s great.

You might ask, what about actually beating on things with a sledgehammer, that’d be fun? You can and people do. Get an old tire and get medieval on it. But you’re going to need more room, have to do it outside and since it’s a faster motion you run a risk of injury.

And soon when the time arises that you need to shovel your driveway or drive a stake into the ground for the big top you’ll be ready.