A little activity goes a long way!

For those who have seen "Last of the Mohicans," you will recognize these pictures right away. Those of you who have not seen it, rent it, and come to Hickory Nut Gorge, Chimney Rock, and the Broad River. A breathtaking site that offers plenty of activity. Hiking, cycling, paddling, rock hopping...a little 'evolutionary' fitness along with a cold beverage at the end of the day does a body good! (No matter how you choose to consume calories...paleo, Mediterranean, North Carolinian...)

Have fun, eat well, and PLAY!

trial and error

I've always told my clients, and those who seek nutritional advice, to try one thing, but try it for more than a couple of months. Our bodies have to adapt to what we put it through. Try eating less calories, but try eating less starches first. If after 8 weeks or so, they don't feel better, maybe this doesn't work for them. Here is why...

"Over the past century, numerous studies have addressed this issue of how much more easily some of us fatten than others. One of the most famous was from Vermont State Prison. Endocrinologist Ethan Sims raised convicts food consumption first to 4000 calories a day. Then as much as 7000 per day, while remaining sedentary. There were "marked differences between individuals in ability to gain weight", he reported. Of his 8 subjects that went 200 days on this regimen, two gained weight easily and six did not. Once convict manged to gain less than ten pounds after 30 weeks of forced gluttony. When the experiment ended, all the subjects "lost weight readily, with the same alacrity," in fact, as that with which obese patients typically RETURN to their usual weight after semi-starvation diets. Sims concluded that we're all endowed with the ability to adopt our metabolism "in response to both over- and undernutrition," but some of us, as with any physiological trait, do it better than others."

In another study...
"One of the most telling observations that emerged from these studies of metabolic rate was how greatly it might differ between individuals of equal weight, or similar it might be between those of vastly different weights. In 1915, Francis Benedict studied basal metabolism translated into the minimal amount of energy expended over the course of a day, measured in 89 men and 68 women. There were huge variations. For men who weighed roughly 175 pounds, the minimal expenditure ranged from 1600 to 2100 calories. Implying that one 175 pound man could eat 500 calories a day more that another 175 pound man, and yet would gain no more weight by doing so, even if physical activity were identical. Heavier women also tended to expend more energy, but variations were striking. One of Benedict's female subjects weight 106 pounds, whereas another weighed 176, and yet both had a basal metabolic rate of 1475 calories."


WOW! Talk about varying body types. So one may ask, "why does one diet work for one person, and not for the another?" Above are your answers.

Trial and error.

book learning does a body good.

"The two most comprehensive attempts to deal with the question of cancer in isolated pops were in The Natural History of Cancer, published in 1908, and The Mortality of Cancer Throughout the World, published in 1915. In Fiji, among 120,000 aboriginals, there were only two recorded deaths from malignant tumors. In Borneo, Dr. Pagel had been in practice for 10 years and never saw a case. In the US, the proportional number of cancer deaths rose dramatically--in NY, from 32 per 1000 deaths in 1864, to 67 in 1900. In Phillie, from 31 in 1861, to 70 in 1904.

The absence of malignant cancer in isolated pops prompted the question about why cancer did develop elsewhere. One early hypothesis was that meat-eating was the problem, and that primitive pops were protected from cancer by eating mostly vegetarian diets. But this failed to explain why malignancies were prevalent among the Hindus in India, to whom the "the fleshpot is an abomination," and rare to absent in the Inuit, Masai, and other carnivorous populations. As Isaac Levin wrote in 1910, "this hypothesis hardly holds good in regard to the American Indians, as they consume a great deal of food rich in nitrogen (meat) frequently to excess.""


So, as early, if not earlier, than the early 1900's, folks were trying to figure out what was causing the increase in the number of cancers relating to food consumption. By the late 1920's, Dr. Hoffman, an American statistician who wrote the above mentioned book The Mortality from Cancer Throughout the World, he among others were already attributing some of this to PROCESSED FOODS...

"Overnutrition in general, in conjunction with modern processed foods...foods demanding refrigeration, artificial preservation and coloring, or processing otherwise to an astonishing degree are to blame. Far reaching changes in bodily functioning and metabolism are introduced which, extending over many years, are the causes or conditions predisposing to the development of malignant new growths, and in part at least explain the observed increase in the cancer death rate of practically all civilized and highly urbanized countries."

What a mouthful. And this was in the 20's???? To this day, the governement, and the powers that be, STILL think that food colorings are SAFE, and processed foods in general are SAFE. Who do they think we are?

These passages are from Gary Taubes' book Good Calories Bad Calories. Check it out.

Take a step back. Learn. Move forward. Repeat.

if you can't guess, kids movement is where it's at!

Dr. Ratey has another piece of the puzzle when it comes to kids' play and lifelong fitness. Kids' fitness is as important to me as anything else, because therein lies our nation's future, and the world's as well. If my generation had PE in schools, and WE are becoming obese at an alarming rate, WHAT WILL HAPPEN IN THE FUTURE, when these generations grow up without vigorous activity in school? This is the problem as I see it.

Learn more about Harvard University psychiatrist Dr. John Ratey, an expert on brain function and exercise, on his website.

Find out more about his book, "Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain", at amazon.com.

EDITED EXCERPT FROM INTERVIEW WITH DR. JOHN RATEY

The first way

The first big way that exercise is very important for (students at City Park Collegiate in Saskatoon) is that it helps address the systems of the brain; the attention system, the impulse control system, the memory and learning system, and the part of the brain that’s involved with learning and memory, the part of the brain that’s what we call the executive functioning area of the brain, or the frontal cortex. Exercise really activates this area of the brain. So what you see, and what you get, are people who are sharper. They’re more attentive, they’re less impulsive, they’re less fidgety. They can sustain their attention longer, and it promotes their ability to sort through information and take it in.

The second way

The second big way that exercise works on the brain is it promotes the internal environment of the brain, of our hundred billion nerve cells that are swimming around in this soup, if you will. Exercise causes a release of all kinds of good things that are known as neurotransmitters, as hormones, as growth factors that actually make our cells more ready to do their job. And our brain cells’ major job, in terms of learning and memory, is to change - adapt we call it. And that means grow. Exercise promotes the best optimal environment for us to do this, to change and grow.

The third way

The third way that exercise helps with learning and with the brain to grow and to learn better, is it promotes a process which we call neurogenesis, or growing new brain cells. There’s nothing that we know of that does that better than exercise. We do it anyway, and there are drugs and there are ways of increasing it when we stress our brains, by learning or by stressing them in a variety of ways, that promotes the growth of new brain cells. However exercise does this better than anything else that we know of.

Conclusion

So the three ways help the learner learn better. We improve the environment for the cells to grow and change and cement in the information. And we also add more brain cells specifically in the area of the brain that has to do with learning and memory, an area called the hippocampus, which we think of as Grand Central Station for memory. And this is the area that adds cells every day anyway. When we learn, we add more cells, but when we exercise, we add many, many more cells than any other activity that we’re aware of. Exercise is the best stimulus for the brain to be ready to learn and grow. Now the biggest problem with our new world, with the cyberworld, is it allows us to sit. We are a sedentary culture. The top ten reasons why we die are contributed to greatly from our sedentary living. Also, by not moving, by sitting, our brains are not as active, and they start to erode much quicker. Just for instance, if middle-aged people are sedentary, and they begin to exercise three to four times a week, they will stave off cognitive decline later in their life by ten to fifteen years. And some studies suggest that if they do this, they will cut the risk of Alzheimer’s disease in half, just if they begin to get moving. Now for our kids, it’s even more important that they try to optimize their brains as much as possible, so that they can be much more well adjusted and ready to take on the new information that they are presented.

As you can see, Dr. Ratey, has part of the solution...