Exercise, memory and evolution

Here goes a new study looking at exercise and it's impact on memory in older folks - specifically those who are candidates for developing Alzheimers.

Researchers...

studied 170 older people with memory complaints of whom 60 percent had objective memory deficits severe enough to be diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment, a condition thought to be a precursor for Alzheimer’s.

Over the next six months, half of the study participants were assigned to a home-based exercise program. They were encouraged to do at least three 50-minute sessions of exercise (mostly walking) each week. Those who were already doing this level of exercise at study entry (about 25 percent) were asked to up their activity level by an additional 50 minutes.

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At the end of six months, exercisers improved modestly (scoring about 20 percent higher than controls) on an overall measure of cognitive abilities. The subgroup of people with mild cognitive impairment also improved. One year after the trial ended, the exercisers still sustained a 10 percent edge on overall cognitive score compared with controls and also had significantly less decline on a memory measure.

Memory is just one benefit of exercising. There are countless others and it should be no surprise that people in the study responded well to physical activity.

Daily physical activity is written into the evolutionary behavioral patterns that humans have had since we started walking on two feet. We are designed to adapt and grow as we respond to our environment mentally and physically.

We are meant to be active - not in a supernatural sense - but in a very practical engineering sense.

The fact that we call exercise 'exercise' and conceive of it as a separate activity is at the heart of the problem. Caloric expenditure through movement (i.e. exercise) used to be inherent to our lifestyle. Now it's an activity, an option, a product.

Exercise is now something separate, something additional, something unnecessary. It is no longer inherent.

For a society of people who rely so heavily on science to design and produce drugs to address lifestyle diseases, I can't understand why people don't look at evolution - one of the most important scientific theories in history - as a prism for understanding the lifestyle that we are evolved for, which would have included daily physical activity even as we got older...

The only reason drugs work is because receptors for those drugs already exist in the body and brain. And the only reason those receptors exist is that our bodies already produce those kinds of drugs.

Instead of outsourcing the production of these drugs to large companies that charge us lots of money, it's much more efficient and ultimately empowering and safe to create those chemicals ourselves through proper lifestyle.

Just as outsourcing jobs to foreign countries is arguably un-American, I would argue that outsourcing the production of drugs to corporations is uh-human.

And in the end, as much as you may want to disagree, we are still very much designed to be human.

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If you're interested in reading more about looking at evolution as a lifestyle guide, check out this post at Mark's Daily Apple.

Michael Pollan on Bill Moyers Journal

Here's the video - part 1, part 2.

If you haven't read any of Pollan's books, he lays out a lot of good information in the interview.

Marketing junk food to kids

'Cyberchondria'

Microsoft released a study on the net-based phenomena - cyberchondria - which leads people to think they have worse afflictions than they actually do:

The study suggests that self-diagnosis by search engine frequently leads Web searchers to conclude the worst about what ails them.

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Although the term “cyberchondria” emerged in 2000 to refer to the practice of leaping to dire conclusions while researching health matters online, the Microsoft study is the first systematic look at the anxieties of people doing searches related to health care, Eric Horvitz said.

Mr. Horvitz, an artificial intelligence researcher at Microsoft Research, said many people treated search engines as if they could answer questions like a human expert.

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They found that Web searches for things like headache and chest pain were just as likely or more likely to lead people to pages describing serious conditions as benign ones, even though the serious illnesses are much more rare.

For example, there were just as many results that linked headaches with brain tumors as with caffeine withdrawal, although the chance of having a brain tumor is infinitesimally small.

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The researchers said that Web searchers’ propensity to jump to awful conclusions was basic human behavior that has been noted by research scientists for decades.

In 1974, the psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman wrote a seminal paper about decisions that are based on beliefs about the likelihood of uncertain events, like the outcome of an election or the future value of the dollar.

They said that people usually employ common sense rules to aid in decisions. The rules can be quite useful, but they also frequently lead to systematic errors in judgment.

'Medicalization of Unhappiness'

Isn't being unhappy a necessary backdrop for re-evaluating your lifestyle to make it better (i.e. less unhappy)?

Given medical professionals reliance on drugs, it makes sense to me that we have gone too far in eliminating - in my opinion - an important backdrop for behavior evaluation and change:

Since 1980, an enormous “medicalization” of unhappiness has occurred. Life’s ills—whether a failure to attain an expected promotion, ongoing conflict with a spouse, or overwhelming distress from coping with competing family and work demands—are too often treated as mental disorders based on the report of a few symptoms of sadness. The medicalization of social life triggered an immense rise in the consumption of antidepressants. The efficacy of these medications for the treatment of normal sadness is often overstated, and their potential to cause harmful effects has sometimes been underestimated.

The consequences of over-medication is particularly worrisome for children and adolescents who are being socialized into a belief system that equates personal suffering with mental disorder to be overcome by taking a pill. The blurring of normal sadness and depressive disorder might also be proceeding at the expense of the smaller group of people who have a true psychiatric disorder and who are in desperate need of adequate psychiatric treatment.

(via Andrew Sullivan via Mind Hacks)

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Pain is a really important part of the feedback loop. Take lepers as an example.

Leprosy doesn't directly cause body parts to fall off, it comprimises the body's ability to communicate pain by causing nerve damage.

Not being able to feel pain, lepers can experience the extensive tissue damage that eventually causes limbs fall off.

Whether physical or psychological - society has dealt with pain by administering pharmaceutical drugs that truncate a very important feedback loop - our ability to suffer.

Call me crazy, but I have to agree with the Unabomber's assertions in Industrialized Society and its Future in the section titled "Control of Human Behavior."

Check out how salient his language reads:

Imagine a society that subjects people to conditions that make them terribly unhappy, then gives them the drugs to take away their unhappiness. Science fiction? It is already happening to some extent in our own society. It is well known that the rate of clinical depression had been greatly increasing in recent decades. We believe that this is due to disruption of the power process, as explained in paragraphs 59-76. But even if we are wrong, the increasing rate of depression is certainly the result of some conditions that exist in today's society. Instead of removing the conditions that make people depressed, modern society gives them antidepressant drugs. In effect, antidepressants are a means of modifying an individual's internal state in such a way as to enable him to tolerate social conditions that he would otherwise find intolerable.

Man-powered treadmill

Redundant but kind of cool.

Obese, toothless, and poor

Buried in this story, there's a local tragedy that links back to - of all things - the 9/11 terrorist attacks:

There's a connection between education and lack of exercise, too, said Dr. Thomas Dannals, a Huntington family physician.

"The undereducated don't know the value of it. They don't have the drive for it. There's a reason you're successful, you've got drive. The same is true for exercise," said Dannals.

Dannals has been trying to change cultural attitudes. The local newspaper has called him "an exercise evangelist" for founding the city's triathlon, marathon and other projects designed to make exercise popular and fun. He's also spearheading a riverfront exercise trail project, called the Paul Ambrose Trail for Health (PATH).

Ambrose was a Huntington physician who died in the Sept. 11, 2001, jet that crashed into the Pentagon. Just before he died, he had been working on a U.S. Surgeon General report on obesity, and was on the plane that morning to attend an adolescent obesity conference in Los Angeles.

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This thread of terrorism and nutrition is kind of oblique but reminds me of what Tommy Thompson said back in '04:

"I, for the life of me, cannot understand why the terrorists have not attacked our food supply, because it is so easy to do"

Agricultural production and consumption as a national security issue would be a pretty fascinating angle to explore for setting up a reform agenda for industrial agricultural.

This very easily translates into an argument for decentralized food production which is more inline with healthier, more sustainable organic farming techniques.

Study: obese kids don't eat enough

The idea that obese kids are not eating enough - as this study suggests - sounds pretty counterintuitive but if you consider how nutrient-lacking processed foods are, it makes sense:

Researchers have long blamed childhood obesity and diabetes, especially in poor neighborhoods, on too much food and too little exercise.

But new findings from a San Antonio study point to another explanation: children living in poverty are obese in part because they don’t eat enough to meet the daily nutritional requirements needed for cell function and metabolism.

A 9-year-old should consume 1,400 to 2,200 calories daily to sustain growth, said Dr. Roberto Trevino, director of the nonprofit Social and Health Research Center. But in the study of 1,400 inner-city children, 44 percent were consuming less than 1,400 calories, and 33 percent were obese.

For children to eat less than their recommended caloric intake and still become obese should be proof positive that whatever they are eating has little to no nutrients.

Missing from the children’s diets were four key nutrients: calcium, magnesium, potassium and phosphorus. All play important roles, but magnesium is involved in more than 300 enzymatic reactions in the body that help to spur metabolism and cell function.
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Without early intervention, these children could be facing open-heart surgery at age 25 and will be on dialysis by age 35, he said.

Open-heart surgery at 25. Unbelievable.

In my opinion, this is a politcal, educational, and even a national security issue. If kids in this country are not a healthy workforce, our country will not be able to keep up with the rest of the world.

Just like the possibility that led poisoning helped bring down the Roman Empire, processed foods could very easily help close the curtains on Pax Americana.

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The nutrition piece gets pretty deep. Research is linking nutrition early on in life with IQ and even aggression levels.

'You are what you eat' may not even capture the entire reality.

The new mantra could become 'You act how you eat'.

Local All-Black Rugby Team w/ a White Coach

Somebody needs to make a long-format documentary on this.

New York Times: Mixed Martial Arts goes to School

These kids in the video are really articulate.

If there is one thing about the MMA fighters of the future, it is going to be their ability to come to a fight with a huge amount of not only technique, but also strategy.

Because the range of possible techniques and schools of thought that MMA fighters potentially can pull from - BJJ, Muy Thai, wrestling, boxing, and any number of other martial arts - fighters will have to be as adaptive as possible to improve their game.

I could see MMA fighters in the future being some of the most tactical, strategic, and even intelligent athletes around.

Learning from Bees

I had a conversation with my friend Liz this weekend about changing habits.

She mentioned a study that showed people who try to change more than one habit at once have higher success rates.

I'm trying to dig up that research, but the conversation has got me thinking about some stuff.

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While taking a video editing class a while back, we read 'In the Blink of an Eye' by the Academy Award-winning film editor/sound designer Walter Murch.

In his book, Murch talks about how bees adjust when their hives are moved:

A beehive can apparently be moved two inches each night without disorienting the bees the next morning. Surprisingly, if it is moved two miles, the bees also have no problem. They are forced by the total displacement of their environment to reorient their sense of direction, which they can do easily enough. But if the hive is moved two yards, the bees will become fatally confused. The environment does not seem different to them, so they do not re-orient themselves, and as a result, they will not recognize their own hive when they return from foraging, hovering instead in the empty space where the hive used to be, while the hive itself sits just two yards away.

Murch mentions moving the beehive as an analogy to a visual jump cut, which is the most jarring transition an editor can make.

I bring up the beehive the analogy in light of habit changing.

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Wendy Wood, a Duke professor of psychology and Neuroscience who studies habits, has found that the key to changing habits is not will power, it is environment:

Although people like to think they are in control of what they do, almost half of human behavior takes place in the same location pretty much every day and comes to be cued by that environment, according to studies conducted by Wendy Wood, James B. Duke professor of psychology and neuroscience.

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...Wood conducted studies demonstrating that people repeat well-practiced actions regardless of whether they intend to do so. She finds that people with a habit to purchase fast food at a particular place tend to keep doing so, even if their intentions change and they no longer wish to do so.

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In another study, Wood found that college students who transferred to a new university were able to break their television-watching habit if the TV were in a different location at their new school. Students who found the TV in the same location were less successful at breaking the TV habit, she says.

That physical environmental factors have so much sway over our behavior calls into question our whether notions of leveraging will power are the best way to frame our attempts to change habits/behavior.

It sounds like a more effective strategy might be the conscious rewiring of our interactions with our environment.

Just like bees, it seems like we need a fresh relationship with our environment to successfully drop our old ways.

Couture on Circuit Training

I know Couture just got beat, but any 45-year-old man who gets in the ring w/ this dude demands a lot of respect.

Couture is in phenomenal shape.

Here's Couture talking about/demonstrating his preferred circuit training:

Drunkorexia

Disordered eating + Drinking Issues = 'Drunkorexia'

Medical studies have shown that the female body doesn't process alcohol in the same way as the male body. Women are more likely to become dependent on alcohol and to suffer from physical and sexual abuse while intoxicated. Studies also have linked drinking to higher incidences of breast cancer.

Women's bodies have more fat, which absorbs alcohol, and produces lower quantities of an enzyme that helps metabolize alcohol, putting them at higher risk for blackouts and cirrhosis.

One addiction expert, Becky Flood, executive director of New Directions for Women, has estimated that two years of women's drinking equals 10 years of a man's.

(hat tip Liz)

Planet Lesnar

Brock Lesnar took down Couture last night at UFC 91 with a TKO.

Lesnar is now the UFC Heavyweight Champ.

This dude is a beast, if he keeps his techniques sharp, he's gonna be very hard to beat.

Couture on the loss:

"Those are some big ham hocks coming at ya. It's hard to get out of the way," Couture joked. "That's just a big son of a (gun). That's all there is to it."

More on Obese Kids

I have been meaning to do some research on child obesity in the District, but more stuff is coming out about kids developing health issues that usually weren't seen until later on in life.

The ones that come to mind are kids are developing more kidney stones than in the past as well as diabetes.

"Adult-Onset Diabetes" is a becoming more of a misnomer all the time.

There is a new study on vascular health that claims that obese 10 year old kids have the arteries of 45 year old people.

So these kids 'vascular age' is around 30 years older than their actual age.

It also calls into question people's ideas of baby fat:

About a third of American children are overweight and one-fifth are obese. Many parents think that "baby fat" will melt away as kids get older. But research increasingly shows that fat kids become fat adults, with higher risks for many health problems.

Scary stuff.

Pollan's Appeal to the President-elect

Michael Pollan wrote an open letter to the President-elect last month in the New York Times Magazine.

He drops some serious knowledge on industrial agricultural practices in the states:

After cars, the food system uses more fossil fuel than any other sector of the economy — 19 percent. And while the experts disagree about the exact amount, the way we feed ourselves contributes more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than anything else we do — as much as 37 percent, according to one study. Whenever farmers clear land for crops and till the soil, large quantities of carbon are released into the air. But the 20th-century industrialization of agriculture has increased the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by the food system by an order of magnitude; chemical fertilizers (made from natural gas), pesticides (made from petroleum), farm machinery, modern food processing and packaging and transportation have together transformed a system that in 1940 produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil-fuel energy it used into one that now takes 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce a single calorie of modern supermarket food. Put another way, when we eat from the industrial-food system, we are eating oil and spewing greenhouse gases.
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There are several reasons health care has gotten so expensive, but one of the biggest, and perhaps most tractable, is the cost to the system of preventable chronic diseases. Four of the top 10 killers in America today are chronic diseases linked to diet: heart disease, stroke, Type 2 diabetes and cancer. It is no coincidence that in the years national spending on health care went from 5 percent to 16 percent of national income, spending on food has fallen by a comparable amount — from 18 percent of household income to less than 10 percent. While the surfeit of cheap calories that the U.S. food system has produced since the late 1970s may have taken food prices off the political agenda, this has come at a steep cost to public health. You cannot expect to reform the health care system, much less expand coverage, without confronting the public-health catastrophe that is the modern American diet.

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I started reading The Omnivore's Dilemma on my way out to Iowa to campaign for Obama and would highly recommend it.

So far that book and this article are the only Pollan I have read, but in broad strokes both lay out the huge issues caused by how we grow food and how they're linked to disease, economics, and even our foreign policy.

Pollan is an important voice. He's not pulling any punches and I don't think he should. This is life and death stuff and he's done his homework and has a lot to say.

Some Cool Hip Mobility Exercises

From Mountain Athlete





(via Conditioning Research)

Rickson Gracie Training

There was talk earlier last year about Rickson possibly making a comeback sometime in 2008 with K-1.

It is especially sad to see an older fighter of Rickson's caliber that was a little too far on the front side of the development of MMA.

His brother Royce always said Rickson was way better than him...and we know how dominant Royce was early on in UFC history (He won 3 of the first 4).

With his Jiu Jitsu skills, Rickson would have been a scary fighter if he cross-trained in muy thai and boxing as younger fighter.

He's a natural athlete.

In any event, I would love to see a Couture v. Gracie fight. Especially if Couture were to down Lesnar this weekend. Age would no longer be an excuse for anyone middle aged.

Rickson is almost 50 and Couture is 45.

Thus Spake Bruce

"All fixed set patterns are incapable of adaptability or pliability.
The truth is outside of all fixed patterns.”

LT training w/ Kimbo Slice

Outsourcing Digestion

Robert Krulwich (of NPR/Radio Lab) has an interesting story up about the two sets of bacteria that we have inside of us - one passed down from parents, the other a byproduct of our environment:

In studies on mice, their bacteria seems to affect weight gain...

Biologist Jeffrey Gordon of Washington University in St. Louis became quite well known a few years ago for a group of very skinny mice in his lab. The mice were skinny because they had no bacteria in their intestines. Gordon had kept them completely bacteria-free. If a bacteria-free mouse eats, food passes right through the intestine, significantly undigested.

So without bacteria, the mouse can eat and eat and eat and never gain weight. But when Gordon exposed the mice to "this big, bad, dirty world," as Gibson calls it, the mice suddenly turned their food into more calories and gained weight. So bacteria matter. Apparently, they can digest food far more efficiently.

So controlling these bacteria may allow doctors to prevent disease (it seems to be working in mice):

University of Chicago immunologist Alexander Chervonsky, with collaborators from Yale University, recently reported that doses of the right stomach bacteria can stop the development of type 1 diabetes in lab mice. "By changing who is living in our guts, we can prevent type 1 diabetes," he told The Wall Street Journal.

The bottom line: We now have two sets of genes to think about — the ones we got from our parents and the ones of organisms living inside us. Our parents' genes we can't change, but the other set? Now that is one of the newest and most exciting fields in cell biology.

I could see this becoming a whole new angle on weight loss..."what kind of bacteria do you have?"

(hat tip Catherine)

Social Networks and Obesity

Wanna lose weight? Get your closest friends to have healthier lifestyles...

Interview (interesting part) starts at 1:25ish.



The next study these folks are gonna undertake will look at specific foods people eat and graft it onto their social networks. Really compelling stuff.

Sport Specific Training: Ski Training

Muscles = Independence

A new Wake Forest study is out talking about the importance of resistance training in maintaining muscle tissue into the golden years, as well as preventing injury and disease:

It only has been during the past decade or so that imaging techniques have captured this muscle loss, noted Dr. Williamson. These advances have allowed physicians to quantify how much muscle people should have at certain ages and to develop outcome measures to test interventions that are intended to preserve muscle.
Most people have lost muscle mass by age 50.
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Lean body mass decreases about 15% between ages 30 and 60, she said. "It comes down to about five to seven pounds of muscle lost each decade."

Although it's probably never too late to try to regain strength, the middle years -- starting at age 40 -- are a key time to pick up the weights.

Muscles = Independence:

"The one thing people are most fearful of losing is the ability to function independently," said Tony Marsh, PhD, associate professor of exercise science at Wake Forest. "The strength of your muscles is fundamental in maintaining your independence."

Muscles as a metaphor for independence is a pretty interesting idea.

Welcome Prince of Petworth Readers!

You are invited to a FREE SEMINAR on Burning Stubborn Belly Fat at One World Fitness on 14th Street.

If you are having difficulty losing weight - even with exercise - this seminar will give you the knowledge you need to see results.

Our clients have dropped 15, 20, even 30+ pounds in 12 weeks.

Free Seminars are Saturday afternoons and Wednesday evenings.

Email Aaron at againstroutine@gmail.com to sign up.

You can also contact the gym directly at 202.483.1850 for more info.

You will learn:

*The HUGE difference between losing weight versus burning fat.

*Why most people are unable to burn fat, especially in the belly.

*Powerful strategies to activate your own fat burning hormones.

*Why 'calorie counting' doesn't work for belly fat.

*All the factors that influence fat burning hormones, not just exercise and diet.

*The 4 body types and how glands distort the shape of your body.

Click the image below to take the online questionnaire and receive more info on your body type:

Again, there is no charge for the seminar and the program works!

--------------

One World Fitness is located at 1738 14th St. NW

(Caddy corner to Pulp/Garden District)

--------------

We look forward to helping you reach your fitness goals!

Aaron, CPT // againstroutine@gmail.com // http://www.againstroutine.com/

--------------

FREE WEIGHT LOSS SEMINAR @ One World Fitness

(Click image for map)

Come learn how to BURN STUBBORN BELLY FAT!

If you are having difficulty losing weight - even with exercise - this free seminar will give you the knowledge you need to see results.

Our clients have dropped 15, 20, even 30+ pounds in 12 weeks.

Email Aaron at againstroutine@gmail.com to sign up.

You can also contact the gym directly at 202.483.1850 for more info.

You will learn:

*All the factors that influence fat burning hormones, not just exercise and diet.

*The 4 body types and how glands distort the shape of your body.

*The HUGE difference between losing weight versus burning fat.

*Why most people are unable to burn fat, especially in the belly.

*Powerful strategies to activate your own fat burning hormones.

*Why 'calorie counting' doesn't work for belly fat.

Free Seminars are held Saturday afternoons and Wednesday evenings.

Please contact us to let us know that you are coming - againstroutine@gmail.com.

There is no charge for the seminar and the program works!

--------------

One World Fitness is located at 1738 14th St. NW

(Caddy corner to Pulp/Garden District)

--------------

We look forward to helping you reach your fitness goals!

Aaron, CPT // againstroutine@gmail.com // http://www.againstroutine.com/

--------------

About me

I am a Certified Personal Trainer (NCSF) and I have been training at One World Fitness for over a year. I work full time at NPR heardquarters in DC and work part time in the evenings at the gym.

My background is in martial arts (Shaolin kempo, BJJ, Krav Maga) and weightlifting. I have also been a gym rat since high school.

I sustained an injury running 2 years ago that made me want to help others prevent injury, encourage sustainable fitness activities, and promote overall well being.

I am originally from Southern California and moved to the DC area during the summer of 2005.

Feel free to contact me if you have any questions, suggestions for my site, or would like to sign up for a free weight loss seminar at One World Fitness.

Aaron
Certified Personal Trainer
againstroutine@gmail.com

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