Adaptation in Humans

Life is ten percent what happens to you and ninety percent how you respond to it.

-Lou Holtz

I really find human evolution amazing and find it even more interesting when looking at the adaptation in humans that we've gone through and continue to go through.

When you think about it, the body so easily adapts to a change in the environment, what kinds of food you put in it, what kinds of movement or stress you put on it, etc.

I have a client of mine who is in his mid-50s that is in one of my classes that came up to me last night and told me that it had been one year since he had a heart attack.

It was a real eye opener for him and he said he felt lucky to have a second chance to turn things around from being unhealthy to being healthy.

He said he had always been overweight and in his words "I thought I was immortal. No matter what I ate or how little exercise I got, there weren't going to be any consequences to that."

But after that heart attack, he quickly changed his mind.

He started eating better, started exercising, and a year later, he dropped between 70-80 pounds and when he went to the doctor the other day for a stress test, the doctor was amazed at how healthy of a transformation he had made in just one year.

That's the amazing part about the adaptation in humans.

Even if you've been living an unhealthy lifestyle for 10, 20, even 30 years, of eating horrible foods, gaining weight, being sedentary, etc., in the big picture, it does not take long for your body to adapt positively when you start making healthier decisions about what you eat and how you move your body for exercise.

It's great to hear that client of mine talk about how much better he physically feels now that he's making better choices about his health. How it puts a smile on his face to be able to chase after his granddaughter that he might not have been able to share time with if that heart attack had been a little worse.

The bottom line is that:

1) no one is immortal to unhealthy choices you make on how you treat your body. The effects might not be immediate, they might not even show up within 10-20 years, but at some point, it WILL catch up to you.

2) it's never too late to start making healthier choices AND if in the big picture, you stick with it CONSISTENTLY, your body will reward you fairly quickly to those healthier choices that you make.

For the most part, we don't control much that happens in our lives. We don't control whether we get hired for a job, laid off from a job, lose our health insurance, or see a loved one get seriously ill.

But the one thing that all of us have control over, is the ability to decide how well we treat our bodies.

Your body is your gift and it's your choice whether you want to treat it well or not.

FRIDAY LINK:

Just a quick link to an article that might surprise you on bad breakfast foods.

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Effects of Food Additives

I'm not a big fan of processed food and all the effects of those food additives.

I think you can get by in life simply eating meats, fruits, veggies, nuts, and some oil.

But I found a good article that goes over the effects of food additives and which food additives are the best to avoid. I'm not going to go over all of them but a few caught my eye to talk about a little more.

1. Artificial Sweeteners. Shockingly, I'm not horribly against these when taken in very LOW dosages. Granted, I guess i'm kind of biased since I have a one Diet Coke a day requirement an hour or so before my daily workout, just for the caffeine energy boast. Regular soda is bad and if I'd like to see any progress on decreasing the amount of regular soda and it meant people switching to diet soda and not water and just continuing to drink regular soda, I'll pick diet soda.

2. High Fructose Corn Syrup. Very simply, I hate HFCS. Don't see anything good about it and I hate the fact that at the same time our government talks about improving the health of Americans they are giving massive subsides to the farming communities to make more corn, to then be processed into High Fructose Corn Syrup, to then be turned into this fake sugar, that in turns is helping lead the way to larger American waistline.

3. Hydrogenated Oils. These are pretty much where the Trans Fats come from and thankfully the FDA now requires that food manufacturers actually list on the nutritional labels how much trans fat is in a product. Studies on trans fat pretty much show that it causes your LDL cholesterol (bad stuff) to increase and your HDL cholesterol (the good stuff) to decrease. So stay away when you see it listed on a food label.



The article gives some pretty good tips for how to evaluate the ingredients for the bad food additives and they're pretty simple.

1. Choose foods that don't have a lot of ingredients listed and the ones that are listed are recognizable.

2. If your grandmother wouldn't recognize the ingredient, then it's more than likely man-made so stay away from it.

3. Probably my favorite and one I always preach: if you can't pronounce it, then it's more than likely processed.

There's a lot of bad effects of food additives so be careful of what's inside the foods that you think are healthy but might not be. Read the labels using the above criteria and that should help you make healthier choices.

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Sample Interval Training Workout

I was doing some reading on a few interval training workout studies last week that were conducted by some Australian researchers and experimented with a few options and thought I would give you a sample of what they were so you could give them a try yourself.

The first interval training workout I tried had you go at a high intensity for 24 seconds, and then recover at a lower intensity for 36 seconds.

I first started off with a slow warm up for 3 minutes and then at the 3 minute mark went high for 24 seconds, then slowed down for 36 seconds, then high again for another 24 seconds followed by another low intensity for 36 seconds. I continued doing this until the clock had reached 20 minutes and then did a cooldown for 3 minutes.

It was a good workout and I definitely felt spent when I was done.

I was doing this workout on an upright stationary bike and it might be possible to do this on a treadmill but the bike seemed more practical since you could easily switch between the high intensity and low intensity fairly quickly (by the way, resistance is more important with these when using a bike rather than speed. Try to pick a resistance that you can only pedal between 70-80 RPMs on the high intensity bouts).

A couple of days later, I tried another interval training workout based on what the Australians did where the high intensity is 8 seconds and the low intensity is 12 seconds.

Again, I warmed up for 3 minutes on the upright bike and then started with the intervals after that until the clock said 20 minutes.

This was a good workout but I didn't like the practicality of it.

It takes at least 3-4 seconds to reach the appropriate RPM range so you're really only getting about a 4 second burst.

This workout is completely impractical on a treadmill and even if doing this outside on a track or something seems impractical since again, it's going to take you at least 3-4 seconds to reach your top speed.

Overall it was a good workout but, I just thought the intervals were just a bit too short for practical purposes.

The last interval training workout that I tried was meeting in the middle of the other two: 16 seconds at the high rate, 24 seconds at the lower rate.

I did this on the upright bike again, started out with the 3 minute warm up and then did the intervals until the clock hit 20 minutes.

This one felt harder than the 24-36 intervals and I felt the most spent from this one compared to the other two methods, which kind of surprised me. Again, I'm not sure how practical this would be on a treadmill, but might work if you were doing sprints outside.

For overall fat loss, I dropped quite a bit of weight last week when incorporating these (along with staying in line with my eating) so the fat loss results working with these are pretty impressive.

As I mentioned in a prior interval training post, you can get good results when doing these types of routines without going completely all out. You need to push yourself but you don't necessarily have to go at a rate that you would if someone was chasing you with a knife.

Overall, I would suggest using the 16-24 method and the 24-36 method for a good interval training workout. Give them a shot and let me know what you think.

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Heart Disease in Women and Men

It's estimated that in 2006, there were 81,100,000 case of heart disease in women and men in the United States. Granted, this number takes into account anyone with high blood pressure to all out cardiac arrest but, when looking at that number, it's still pretty staggering.

I'll spare you my soapbox against the argument that red meat is to blame for this and talk about a new study that came out showing a connection between eating simple carbs and heart disease in women and men.

This study looked at not only the number of carbs ingested by people, but also looked at the glycemic index of those carbs.

Taking in foods that are higher on the glycemic index are associated with higher levels of triglycerides and the lowering of HDL cholesterol (the good kind) which in turns can increase your risk of heart disease.

The Italian researchers in this study had over 15,000 men and 32,000 women fill out questionnaires of their dietary intake and then followed them for 8 years.

What they found:

..the researchers found that women who consumed the most carbohydrates overall had about twice the incidence of heart disease as those who consumed the least. Closer analysis showed that the risk was associated with higher intake of high-glycemic foods.

"Thus, a high consumption of carbohydrates from high-glycemic index foods, rather than the overall quantity of carbohydrates consumed, appears to influence the influence of developing coronary heart disease," the researchers wrote.

What's really interesting is that they didn't find this same connection between high glycemic index foods and heart disease among men.

The researchers speculated that:

The difference might be due to the action of sex hormones....Male hormones, androgens, appear to slow the transformation of carbohydrates into blood sugar, whereas the female hormone estrogen speeds the process, she said.

The researchers concluded that women need to focus not only simply low in carbohydrates but low in simple sugars.

"Look at the label," Steinbaum said. "It says 'carbohydrates.' Under that, it says 'sugars.' When you have a high number for sugars, that's a way to know what the glycemic index is."

I REALLY don't like that simplistic view of how to connect a food to it's glycemic index, and I'll go even further to say I don't even like the use of the glycemic index when evaluating whether a food is "good" or "bad."

Here's an example of what I mean.


An apple. Using what she says and only looking at the sugar content of a cup of apple, out of 22 carbohydrates, 16 of them are sugar. So using what she is saying, that must mean that the glycemic index on that apple is high and should be avoided.


Then let's look at white bread. In 40 grams of white bread, there are 30 carbohydrates and out of that only 7 grams are sugar.

But when you look at the actual glycemic index of both of these foods, an apple rates anywhere from 28-40 (which would rank as low out of a scale of 100), and white bread is ranked anywhere between 70-100 (very high).

So I think the researcher's try at simplifying things won't work for a lot of different foods (especially fruits since they tend to be for the most part, composed of simple, natural sugars).

The whole glycemic index might be useful in some ways but from a practical standpoint, it can just make things more confusing. Most of these foods would show the estimated spike in blood sugar only if the situations were right: empty stomach, it was the only food being eaten, and you ate enough of it.

But most people rarely find themselves eating foods all by themselves. If you add protein and fat to carbs in a meal, that protein and fat slows the absorption of that carb (even the high glycemic index carbs) into the blood stream.

In the end, a lot of carbs are processed and the best thing we can do is just stay away from them.

I think it would go a long way in changing heart disease in women and men in this country if you stuck with eating just meats, fruits, veggies, nuts, and oils and for the most part, leave out the rest.

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Weight Loss for Obese Teens

The number of obese children in this country is steadily getting higher and solutions on weight loss for obese teens need to start looking at any and every option.

I was at a conference about a month ago and one of the sessions was on working with obese parents and children.

When looking at statistics, between 1976 and 1980 the number of overweight and obese children between the ages of 12-15 was 5%. Between 2003 and 2006, that number is at 18%. Not Good.



It's estimated that one third of babies born in 2009 will develop diabetes before the age of 18.

An obese child is at a higher risk of having high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and it's estimated that 80% of all overweight 10-15 year olds are obese at age 25.



It's not a good sign of things to come for the next couple of generations and there are some thoughts that because of these health problems caused by obesity, that the next couple of generations born in the US may have a shorter life expectancy then current, older generations.

A new study though comes out with a new option that could be useful when it comes to helping lose weight in these young, obese children.

The study found that a high-protein, low-carb diet is a safe and effective way for severely obese teens to lose weight.

There's always been concerns that a low-carb diet could impact growth and increase cholesterol levels due to the higher fat involved in most low-carb diets.

But in this study, they found that not to be the case.

The researchers assigned a group of severely obese teens to either a high-protein, low carb diet or to a low-fat diet. The average age of the child was around 14 years old. The study had these teens on the respective diets for 13 weeks.

The results:

On average, those on the high-protein, low-carb diet lost 29 pounds over 13 weeks, while those on the low-fat diet lost 16 pounds. Both groups kept the weight off nine months after the study.

And for any health issues that they were concerned about with having these teens on the high-protein, low-carb diet:

The high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet also appeared to be safe, with no serious harmful effects on growth, bone mineral density, and various "metabolic" parameters, such as cholesterol levels. Both groups showed declines in levels of harmful LDL cholesterol and increases in levels of heart-healthy HDL cholesterol.

There always tends to be this stigma about low-carb diets and I think it has to do with the initial idea that originally came out when the diet became popular that you could eat bacon, fried food, etc. on it. And quite frankly, I just don't consider those part of a true low-carb diet.

For the most part, high-carb diets have been a more recent integration into the overall human diet.

For the vast history of human evolution, our bodies for the most part have eaten a low-carb diet.

20,000 years ago, we simply ate meats, vegetables, fruits, nuts, and some occasional eggs and oils. When looking at the health of people that lived then, for the most part they were stronger, faster, leaner, and overall healthier than we are today (at least in the western world).

So it doesn't really surprise me that a low-carb diet for obese teens turned out to be more effective for fat loss as well as providing overall health benefits because a true low-carb diet is what children lived on for most of our time here on earth.

I think if we could get kids (and adults as well) to simply eat those foods above, it would take a lot of the complexity away from deciding what is healthy and not healthy among the rest of the food that is in the center of the grocery store.

But, that's easier said then done. So how do we get those kids to eat those foods?

In the end, it HAS to be up to the parents to set this in motion.

I'm just taking a guess here with no scientific evidence in front of me to back this up but, chances are that if a child is overweight or obese, the parents are as well.

In other words, maybe we need to change the term "childhood obesity" to "family obesity" because that's truly where the problem AND the solution are at.

Which means, if you want an overweight child to eat healthier, then you are going to have to as well.

Don't sit there and think that you can leave junk food laying around the house for your consumption but not for your child's. It's just not going to work.

If you want to start off simple instead of making it a complete culture shock for the household, I blogged awhile ago on simple healthy changes you can make now to start on the right track.

The kids will probably complain, pout and say that if it's not junk food they won't eat it but, as the presenter said at the seminar I was at a few weeks ago "A healthy child will never go hungry." At some point, they'll eat what you give them.

Let's not forget about the exercising. Although the eating is the biggest part of the equation, you can't leave out the exercise portion.

The biggest part about getting kids to exercise is that it has to be FUN. Kids bore easily. But if you make it fun, they can get in a fairly vigorous exercise routine without even noticing it.

I wrote about a simple exercise routine for kids to start off with. It works well and don't be afraid to make the routine competitive. Kids tend to be naturally competitive so that should help increase the fun, the intensity, and the chances that they'll want to continue doing them.

Small steps to start with can become big gains in the whole grand scheme of things when it comes to weight loss for obese teens.

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Tax on Sodas

In roughly 30 states there is a tax on sodas with the idea hopefully being that the increased cost will decrease the consumption of those high sugary sodas thus helping in reducing obesity rates.

But, a new study out is showing that small taxes on sodas aren't curbing obesity rates.

When talking about how this tax didn't curb obesity rates, we're specifically about obesity rates in children.



The researcher looked over surveys of over 7,000 fifth graders and looked at how their height to weight ratio changed over a two year period and compared that to the number of high sugar sodas or sports drinks that they drank. They then compared that to the soda taxes that were in effect at the time of the survey (survey was done in 2004).

Two-thirds of the children lived in states that had a tax on sodas where the average tax was 4 cents on the dollar.

What they found was:

They found the taxes made no real difference on overall soda consumption or on obesity for kids overall. They did have a small effect on certain children — especially those from families with an annual income of $25,000 or less. Those kids — who drank about seven cans of soda a week, on average — drank one less can because of the taxes, Sturm said.

At first look, dropping from seven sodas a week to six doesn't seem like a big deal. But, I wrote a while back about soda being bad and gave the breakdown of how cutting out a regular soda habit without changing anything else in your diet can result in significant weight loss over time.

In this situation, if a child was consuming one less 20-ounce soda a week (because really, I think the chances are that it's a 20-ounce bottle they are consuming and not a 12-ounce can), that would reduce the amount of calories they are consuming by 242.5 a week. Over the course of a year, that would 12,610 less calories.

It takes a reduction of 3,500 calories to burn a pound of fat. So in this situation, that would mean over the course of a year, by just dropping this one soda a week and changing nothing else would theoretically result in a three and a half pound weight loss.

The researchers claim though that if the tax was more like 18 cents on the dollar, that might significantly reduce soda consumption.

I'm not sure that I completely buy that. I think it would have to be significantly higher for consumption to really be affected.

I think the last time I looked, a 20-ounce bottle of soda here in Michigan goes for around $1.50 (plus deposit). If you added on 18 cents on the dollar to that, you'd pay around $1.87. Chances are when you buy that now, you give the cashier $2.00. If that tax was added, you'd still give the cashier $2.00 and simply get less change back and wouldn't think twice about it.

Think of the situation with the cigarette tax. In Michigan, the state tax on a 20 pack of cigarettes is $2.00 and then there's the federal tax of $1.01. Essentially, a pack of cigarettes cost $6 with roughly half of that being a tax.

A lot of people still continue to smoke regardless of that price and regardless of the fact that half of it is a tax, but at the same time, a lot of people have quit because of that high price.

I would almost think that in order to reduce the consumption of soda significantly, the tax on sodas would have to make the price of the soda double as well.

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Overeating and Depression

I've always thought that there was kind of a chicken and an egg relationship between overeating and depression.

This article talks about a recent study done by Dutch researchers showing a relationship between becoming obese and leading to depression, and depression leading to obesity.

Obesity, Luppino and colleagues found, increases the risk of depression in initially non-depressed individuals by 55 percent and depression increases the risk of obesity in initially normal-weight individuals by 58 percent.

The study was pretty massive. Pooling subjects from 15 published studies:

The studies, which collectively involved more than 58,000 people, used body mass index, or BMI, to gauge how fat or thin a person is. For reference, a US adult with a BMI of 25 or more is considered overweight, while one with a BMI of 30 and above is considered obese.

The study also showed though that it was a little different for people that are overweight but not obese.

Being overweight increased the risk of depression in initially non-depressed individuals somewhat, but depression did not increase the risk of being overweight over time.

All of this tends to make a lot of sense into how overeating and depression can go hand in hand and can lead to a downward spiral.



You become depressed, and you go to food to find some "emotional support." That food then leads to weight gain. You notice the weight gain and it makes you even more depressed about your body image, thus, leading you to eat more, and then being depressed more, etc.

When looking at the obesity epidemic, I've always thought that there was more to it than people just eating more and exercising less. That there was a deeper root cause and that maybe what we really had was a depression epidemic that was the underlying cause of the obesity epidemic (this somewhat relates to an addiction to food post that I talked about recently).

What about an approach to deal with the issue more? What if we started officially categorizing obesity as an eating/psychological disorder just like we do with anorexia and bulimia?

Essentially, it's the same thing: They are all eating disorders, they all have some kind of underlying psychological issues involved in them and eating (or not eating) is just the bio-product of it.

Roughly 1-5% of the population will be diagnosed with anorexia and/or bulimia, yet, it's estimated that ONE-THIRD of the US population is obese.

So again, why are we not treating this as an eating disorder?

It's good that we keep focusing on eduction when it comes to exercise and healthy food choices but, I think we really need to change focus a little bit and realize that there may be more "behind the scenes" when it comes to why we've become so overweight, so quickly.

I hope more is done to look into the connection between overeating and depression because I really think there's something to it.

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