SHR

  I’ve read time and time again how unsustainable it is to continue to raise cows for beef due to their water consumption. The argument is, cows consume so much more water than it takes to grow a comparable amount of crop-derived calories, that its unsustainable to rasie beef to feed the population. Some of the numbers representing water consumption by cows were so large it made me question their accuracy. Those who claim this in their articles also never list their assumptions. How they arrive at the number of gallons of water that go into producing beef. They just throw a number out there – BAM! Most of these numbers are cited by those who would rid the world of the consumption of all animal proteins and make us eat the darling of the high protein plant world – soy. So I set out to see if these numbers were...

No one likes being sick, especially when that sickness causes diarrhea, nausea, and bloating. It is thus unfortunate for the 58 healthy young adults participating in Bruggencate et al’s latest study, as they had to be infected with a live, but attenuated, enterotoxigenic E. coli bug that mimics food poisoning. The participants had to undergo infection after 4-weeks of supplementing with milk concentrate rich in milk fat globule membrane (MFGM) phospholipids or a sodium caseinate placebo. To blind the participants to the intervention, the supplement powders were provided alongside 250 mL of soy milk that was consumed twice per day (125 mL with breakfast and again with dinner). The participants also had to abstain from all dairy products and products containing probiotics. On the first day after infection, the participants experienced a significant increase in fecal wet weight and significant decrease in fecal dry weight, which is the confusing way of...

My blog post yesterday featured a picture of me when I turned 50 almost 8 years ago. So many people thought it was a current picture and made comments on Facebook about how great I "look" that I felt like a fraud. If I looked like that I'd be pretty damn pleased right now. But I don't. It pains me to post this picture but its how I look NOW. I was 248 on Thursday and I weighed in at 245 when I took this at the gym yesterday. I look bloated and am carrying much of my fat in my lower back and from the distended gut I think some visceral fat as well. Well this is my before picture and what I look like currently. I feel like I really lost a lot of ground over the past 8 years. But I intend to regain that ground and more...

  Have you ever heard that you can’t build muscle while dieting? It is certainly something that I used to believe, but my thoughts on the subject have changed over the last couple months as more and more data was being published showing that my previous belief was wrong. The most recent data comes from the lab of Dr. Stuart Phillips at McMaster University. This guy is a true superman of research investigating skeletal muscle metabolism and the impact that exercise and nutrition can have on it. I highly recommend you read up on some of this review articles if you are interested in the subject matter – you won’t be disappointed. Anyways, in Dr. Phillips’ latest study, he recruited 40 overweight young men (average age and body fat of 23 years and 24%, respectively) and had them complete an intense 4-week exercise routine while sustaining a 40% caloric deficit. The...

I had intended to keep doing what I've been doing through February and start to reduce bodyfat in March but I decided to get started now. I'm tipping the scales at 248 pounds right now and my goal is to strip as much fat as I can from now till my 58th birthday on June 11th. When I turned 50 I took the above picture. I was 212 pounds. I have added muscle in the past years. Not sure yet just how much, but I'm about to find out. Sleep issues and injuries last couple of years caused me many setbacks. But I have no excuses now.  I fasted for 24 hours and broke my fast on Thursday by eating some macadamia nuts, cheese and coconut oil. See where I'm heading? I have cut all carbs out except for residual amounts that occur in some foods. Today, Sunday 1/31, is my...

As promised during Physical Culture Radio Show today with Brooks Kubik a snap shot of my heart rate during a typical Back workout. As you can see, from a cardiovascular perspective, this weight-training session looks more like I was doing interval sprints! So what does that tell us about the cardiovascular contributions of the right weight training sessions?

Exercise is a core component of blood glucose management for individuals with type-2 diabetes (T2D). Of course, two questions anyone embarking on an exercise routine must ask are what type and what time. Recently, Terada et al compared several answers to these questions to determine if one answer may be more favorable than another. Specifically, 10 middle-aged adults with diagnosed T2D but no history of T2D-related complications were recruited to undergo a randomized, controlled crossover trial in which they completed five separate experimental conditions: fasted high-intensity interval exercise (HIIE), post-breakfast HIIE, fasted moderate-intensity continuous exercise (MICE), post-breakfast MICE, and no exercise (control). Each exercise session lasted 60 minutes on a treadmill. The HIIE consisted of 15 bouts of 3 minutes working at 40% VO2peak followed by 1 minute working at 100% VO2peak (average intensity over the 60 minutes was 55% VO2peak). The MICE consisted of continuous running at 55% VO2peak. The...

Considering that obesity is a disease of energy imbalance that promotes storage over expenditure, it is not surprising that treatment revolves around reversing this equation to promote weight loss. However, it is questionable whether weight loss is sufficient to reverse all metabolic changes induced by obesity. A great example of this is the Look AHEAD trial, in which over 5000 overweight-obese patients with type-2 diabetes were followed for an average of 10 years while undergoing an intensive lifestyle intervention that promoted weight loss through a decreased caloric intake and increased physical activity. Despite losing significantly more weight than a control group, resulting in greater reductions in all nearly all cardiovascular risk factors, there was no difference between the two groups in cardiovascular morbidity and mortality. Another related issue is that formerly obese individuals are prone to regaining their lost weight, leading to a rebound of cardiometabolic risk factors. Anyone can cut...

What defines healthy obesity? Observational studies have established that not all obese individuals display the same risk for developing cardiovascular disease or type-2 diabetes (T2DM). This phenotype has been called “metabolically healthy obesity.” The mechanism underlying the switch in phenotype from the metabolically healthy status to unhealthy status is still unclear.Thanks to a recent study by Pujia et al, we may be one-step closer to filling this knowledge gap. These researchers performed a cross-sectional analysis of 172 middle-aged, overweight-obese Caucasian subjects who were undergoing health-screening tests at their outpatient nutrition clinic.The participants were divided into three groups: healthy overweight-obese (max of two criteria for metabolic syndrome and no glucose intolerance); metabolic syndrome (three or more criteria without T2DM) and T2DM (only those with fasting glucose ≥126 mg/dL or antidiabetic treatment). The focus of this research was on differences in the respiratory quotient (RQ) between groups, whereby a lower value signifies increased...

Several studies have reported that physical activity prevents fructose-induced metabolic abnormalities. Young men who supplemented their regular diets with 40 ounces of soda per day, providing 75 g of fructose, showed increased triglycerides and signs of low-grade inflammation only when inactive (walking ~4200 steps per day). However, simply increasing the number of steps to about 13,000 per day protected against these changes. Another study demonstrated that performing two 30-minute cycling sessions before lunch and dinner in conjunction with a weight-maintenance diet providing 30% of kcal as fructose completely normalized blood lipids relative to consuming the same diet when sedentary. Most recently, Egli et al assessed how a single exercise session altered the metabolic fate of a pure fructose load in young healthy males with the use of isotopically-labeled fructose. The participants were studied for three 5-day periods in which they received a controlled, high-fructose (30% kcal as a beverage), weight-maintenance diet...