Why Your Baby Moves Better than You

We talk a lot about nutrition on this blog, but I don’t want you to think that what you eat is the only thing that influences how you look, feel, and perform. While diet is definitely #1, movement is also a vital part of living a healthy, fulfilling life. We often take our movement for granted, and only when we lose it does its importance become clear. This can happen acutely (injury/stroke), or chronically (desk job), but either way, when it is gone, it can be defeating, painful, and depressing. Today, let’s look at chronic restrictions in movement, and why your lifestyle is most likely leading you down a rode to immobility and discomfort.

Begin with the End in Mind

What do you think of when you picture getting old? Are you healthy, enjoying life, able to do all things you have always wanted? Or, are you weak, frail, and reliant on others for support? Either of these is possible, but Americans most often think of aging in relation to losses in quality of life. It is not inevitable that you will lose your strength, flexibility, vision, cognitive skills, etc; it is only a common trend resulting from years of neglect. Industrialized countries, especially America, have innovated to the point of total convenience. We have cars to help us travel. We have one-stop shops where we can buy everything from clothing to groceries to toilet supplies. We have microwaves to cook our pre-made frozen meals in seconds. We have everything we need so that we save time and energy. But for what?

We have constructed our lives so that we can literally roll out of bed, sit down to eat without any work in preparing food, sit in our car while driving to work, sit at our desk for 4 hours, eat a lunch out (while sitting), sit for another 4 hours at work (all of this in front of a computer screen), sit in our cars again to come home, sit down for dinner, and then sit in front of the TV (more screen time) before rolling back into bed. We do this for 40+ years, then wake up one day with (hopefully) more wealth than when we started, a family, friends, house, etc, and with no health or ability to enjoy it.

It doesn’t have to be this way though. When you were born, you were full of energy, movement, and life. You built strength, balance, coordination, and stability. If you wanted to look at something on the ground, you would squat down and actually be able to stay there. If you wanted to get somewhere fast, you would run. If you wanted a challenge, you would work your way across the monkey bars at the park. If you wanted to go play soccer, you didn’t think about taking it easy; you went out and played until you couldn’t walk. So what happened? We do not lose our ability to move because we get old. We get old because we stop moving! In the first few years of life, we are constantly exploring and moving. We enjoy physical challenges and testing our own abilities. After a time, however, sitting becomes more and more dominant, and by the time we are out of school, sitting is almost all that we know. Good thing, because there is a lot more of it to come! Now we continue to practice sitting until things start to hurt and our waist line starts to expand. We want to start moving, but it is hard when we are so out of touch with our own bodies. It can be disheartening to not move like we once did, and it often keeps us from really spending time on it until it is too late.

Taking Control

If you want to maintain the highest quality of life, you must move. While I am obviously a huge supporter of exercise and strength training, I also believe strongly in designing one’s life to promote health and longevity. When it comes to staying young, here are my top daily activities:

-          Cook more. Spending time in the kitchen can be an adventure and a workout all at once. Don’t think it’s hard work? Try making your own mayonnaise with a whisk…your arms will be sore for a week. Other benefits include time spent standing, becoming more in tune with the food that you put into your body, training both sides of the brain (creativity in cooking while needing to get those measurements right!), and engaging in a relaxing activity. Cooking is definitely one of my top lifestyle choices for longevity.

-          Buy a standing desk. Start asking around about this and you will undoubtedly find someone who has made the switch and is now healthier, happier, and probably out of back pain. Sitting might be the single most detrimental activity when it comes to maintaining pain free movement. Back pain, neck pain, and knee pain are often traced back to extensive sitting. So get out of that chair and start standing!

-          Take up an active hobby. Find a sport you like to play and join a league or team. Start gardening. Go hiking on the weekends. Find something that you enjoy doing that gets you moving and hopefully also gets you outside. There are tons of options here, so brainstorm and start playing around with different activities.

-          Read more. While this is not physically active, keeping the mind active can be just as important as keeping the body active. There is so much in this world to learn about, why not spend some time every day becoming just a little bit wiser.

-          Go for a walk every day. Walking is our most natural form of locomotion and it can be a peaceful time spent unwinding while also moving. If the weather is bad, just walk up and down the stairs in your building. If it is sunny, go out and soak up some rays.

-          Do your homework. This is for all of you that have past injuries that are still nagging you. Go see someone about it, and then do what your health professional tells you to do. Too often I run into people that have poor movement or are in pain due to past injuries that they never fully recovered from. Most of the time, it is because they never took their recovery seriously. By the time I see them, they have been avoiding any movement that causes discomfort in the affected area and are so bound up that it takes serious work to undo the damage. Don’t hide from pain, figure out what it causing it and then work to regain your movement!

-          Learn how to breathe. Just because we all have to breathe does not mean that we are very good at it. We can thank sitting and stress for this one. Most people, unless they have actively worked to improve their breathing, tend to breathe with their shoulders rather than diaphragm. If you want to see what you do, look in a mirror and take a big breath. Do your shoulders come to your ears? Not good. To improve this, think of your torso as a balloon. With every breath, your goal should be for your torso to expand in all directions. That means you should feel your stomach, sides and back all expand. To practice, use an exercise called Crocodile Breathing from the video below.

If you are a shoulder breather, spend some time every day working on this. This can also be used as a stress reduction technique. Just lie on your stomach and breathe so that your low back pushes away from the ground. 20-30 breaths should do the trick. If you can master your breathing, you will improve not only your stress levels, but also your overall movement.

A Fresh Start

There are plenty of ways we can add movement to our lives, so take some time to think about what will work best for you. The two things that I feel are most important to sustainable health are finding ways to avoid sitting (at work, at home, in transit), and taking control of your food (cooking, shopping, reading). If we start playing around with some of these ideas, we will see that it is not aging that should be feared, but rather immobility (and this is in your control). The fact that you get older have very little to do with your movement quality. It is the 365 days a year of sitting 8+ hours a day that adapts your body to sitting. Why should your body care about good posture and moving when it can just hang out all day on a chair? Repetition leads to adaptation, so start thinking about what you want your body to adapt to, and start doing it!

We all start the same, able-bodied and full of potential. Let’s take a step back and see if we are really living up to that potential. If not, maybe it is time to start back at square one and reconstruct our lives to center around what is most important—movement.  

Fat is Fuel, Not Foe (Part 3)

Welcome to the last installment in our series on fat. We have already seen that fat is an important part of a balanced diet, can help us to lose weight, and will help to improve our heart health!

Today we will conclude our series by looking at some of the psychological barriers to changing our cultural views on fat and then how we can best utilize fat in our daily lives.

The Psychology of Fat

Fat is required for keeping our bodies working at their best. Our brains, nerves, and cells all depend dearly on the fat that we consume to work properly. While we know that fat is an important part of our diet, it can sometimes be hard to get past the psychological fear of gaining fat from eating fat.

We have become obsessed with food quantity when it is quality that can make all the difference. We have gone overboard on the low-fat, low calorie foods and wonder why we are not getting any healthier (or leaner). We have mistaken weight loss for fat loss, and being skinny for being healthy. Just the fact that fatty acids derived from food and adipose tissue are both referred to as FAT make this a difficult issue. It is as if every time we think of the fat content of a food, we expect it to just settle right in to our love handles without a second thought.

It takes education and an open mind to reprogram our thoughts and behaviors, but it is going to be important if Americans are going to have any chance of healing themselves. The food industry has been capitalizing on our fat fears for too long and it is time to retake control. (If an item is low-fat, it is almost inevitably high-sugar, and sugar is addicting). So let’s look at fat in a new light. Let’s think of fat as:

     -  The stuff that makes up 70% of our brains.

     -  The only macronutrient capable of transporting vitamins A, D, E, and K into our bodies.

     -  A key player in hair and skin health.

     -  One of the main structural components of our cells.

     -  Necessary for optimal functioning of the nervous system.

     -  One of the important players in calcium absorption (bone density)

Fat is not just important, it is vital. We cannot live without the right fats, and our bodies actually function best when we have a significant amount of calories coming from fat.

How to Use Fat

If our understanding of fat has changed, then our use of fat must change too. Here is what I feel is the best strategy to make sure you are taking in the right fats:

1)  Eat grass-fed/wild caught animals. These animal products have a beautiful balance of fats, while also providing a variety of vitamins and minerals that are stored in the fat. If you are unable to do so, find lean cuts of grain-fed meat and supplement with fish oil. While this is not optimal, it can be much cheaper, and will help you to avoid the toxins stored in the fat of grain-fed animals.

2)  Eat more avocados, olives, and coconut products. As you may already know, avocados and olive are a wonderful source of monounsaturated fat and can be great for snacking or for adding to other meals. Coconut products are fully of medium-chain saturated fats which have a host of beneficial properties. Choose between coconut oil for cooking, coconut milk for drinking, coconut butter or flakes to add as toppings, or just straight coconut for eating!

3)  Use saturated fat for cooking. Saturated fat is the most stable type of fat when exposed to heat, so using fats such as coconut oil, butter (grass-fed is best, look for Organic Valley Pasture Butter or Kerrygold Irish Butter), and animal fats are best used for cooking. If you are worried about animal fat, just make sure you buy it from a grass-fed source. Your local farmer’s market should have a grass-fed beef stand, and I am sure they would be happy to sell you some of the fat.

4)  Use monounsaturated fats as dressing. Oils such as olive oil, avocado oil, and macadamia nut oil can be great on salads. I prefer these as dressings because while more stable than polyunsaturated fats, I still worry about cooking with them. They should be all right for low temperature cooking & baking, but I prefer to just add them cold.

5)  Avoid vegetable oils, and use nuts, seeds, and their derivatives as you would a condiment. Nuts and seeds can be a tasty addition to any meal, we just don’t want to go through a bag of almonds every day. Think of them as a topping (unless you are one of those people that likes adding a little sausage to your ketchup) and enjoy their flavoring.

There are tons of ways to include a variety of fats, but the goal should always be to use the right fat for the right reason. Start thinking about how you use fats on a daily basis and see where there is an opportunity to make a change for the better.

That concludes our series on fat. I encourage all of you to continue to learn about fats and experiment with them in your diet. We can read all we want, but until we start playing around with some of this stuff there is no way to know how it will affect our health. So let’s figure out where we can make a change in our current diets and start getting in those health fats today!  

Fat is Fuel, Not Foe (Part 2)

Continuing our series on why fat is healthy, let us turn our attention to what I consider the most commonly referenced myth regarding fat and health.

Myth #2: Eat vegetable oils, not saturated fat.

I hear this all the time, and it is unsettling that this myth still persists in the face of recent research and when compared to ancestral eating patterns. Let’s first take a look at why saturated fat need not be avoided, and then we will discuss why vegetable oils are some of the least healthy fats (outside of trans fats which I call fake fats because they are manmade).

Saturated Fat and Cholesterol

If you have the time, the article below does a great job of discussing fat including the misconceptions about saturated fat. If you do not have the time, I have summarized what I feel are the take away points below.

http://www.menshealth.com/health/saturated-fat

First, there has been little research showing any link between saturated fat and heart disease, and new information is coming out that other factors such as triglyceride levels and lipoprotein type (not amount) are more important risk factors. The original studies showing that saturated fat and cholesterol relate to heart disease were based on correlative data with little actually research. 

Second, cholesterol needs to be better understood. Cholesterol is an important molecule in the body that is manufactured within the cells and is TRANSPORTED by lipoproteins (LDL, HDL, etc). Cholesterol is important for the synthesis of bile acids, steroid hormones, and vitamin D. It is also required for building and maintaining cell membranes. Lipoproteins, on the other hand, are transport molecules that move fat and cholesterol around the body. There are three main types of lipoproteins: VLDL, LDL, and HDL. VLDL is responsible for transporting triglycerides (fat). LDL is responsible for transporting cholesterol from the liver to the cells of the body. HDL is responsible for transporting cholesterol back from the cells to the liver (to be recycled). Studies are starting to find that when VLDL is high (high triglyceride levels), and HDL is low, LDL starts becoming small and dense. This increases the risk that these particles will get stuck in the arterial lining, leading to inflammation and plaque build-up. Studies are also starting to show that the ratio of HDL to LDL is more important than total cholesterol. How can you raise HDL? Eat more fat (saturated included), and exercise more.

Finally, triglyceride levels and small, dense LDL particles (the two things that are related to heart issues) are more associated with high-carb diets. Our bodies only need a limited amount of carbohydrate intake to function optimally, so any excess carbs will be turned to fat and stored for future use. Insulin plays a big role in this, which, as we talked about last time, is an important hormone in blood sugar regulation and fat storage. While the link between high carb and high triglyceride levels is become more apparent, there have only been comparative studies on LDL particle size. Basically, we know that when you compare high-fat diets to high-carb diets, the high-fat diet will result in lower levels of small, dense particles. So it looks like high-fat, with adequate saturated fat in the diet is the way to go to get your cholesterol in check!

Below I have posted a number of other links that will give you more information on these topics.

http://www.jlr.org/content/51/11/3324.abstract

http://www.ima.umn.edu/2004-2005/MM8.1-10.05/activities/Ross-David/ross2.pdf

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-789X.2008.00518.x/abstract;jsessionid=5DCDCF1883BEFCE1B0E4E191C12F68C4.d02t01

Vegetable Oils and Polyunsaturated Fats

If saturated fat is not bad for us (and is actually very important for optimal health), do we still need to have vegetable oils in our diet?? No! Not only do we not need vegetable oils, I will argue that they are actually unhealthy.

Vegetable oils are predominantly polyunsaturated, meaning they have more than one double bond within the molecule. Why is this important? Because more double bonds = a less stable molecule. They breakdown easily, become rancid with little exposure to light or heat, and are much more likely to become toxic in our bodies. In other words, cooking with vegetable oils is definitely out, but even without heat, you are taking a risk. Many vegetable fats are rancid before they are even opened due to light contamination.

The second issue with veggie oils is that they have an unfavorable ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acids. Omega-3 has been getting press due to its heart-healthy properties, and one of the main health benefits is that it balances out the overwhelming quantity of omega-6 fats that Americans consume each day. Between the consumption of corn-fed animals, vegetable oils, grains, nuts, beans, and dairy, the average American eats up to 20x MORE omega-6 than omega-3 when a healthy ratio would be closer to 2:1. While fish oil and other such omega-3 supplements can help, there is just no way to counteract such high quantities of omega-6. We need to decrease the amount of omega-6 intake, starting with eliminating vegetable oils.

Myth Debunked

So there you have it. Stop avoiding saturated fat and start replacing your high-carb/vegetable-oil-as-the-main-fat diets with more saturated fat (animal products in general) and fat in general. As you make this transition, one important thing to know is that there is a BIG difference between grass-fed/wild animal products (and the fat that comes with them) and corn-fed, farmed animal products. If you can afford to eat grass-fed/wild, go for it. If you cannot, stick with leaner meats as the toxins that these animals are exposed to will be stored in the fat. You can supplement your fat by using coconut oil/milk, butter (you can find grass-fed at whole foods), or by rendering your own fat (or you can easily buy some from the grass-fed beef stand at the farmers market). All of these are great for cooking as saturated fat tends to be more stable when exposed to heat.

Next week, we will conclude this series with some of my thoughts on the psychology of fat and more strategies on how to best increase the fat in your diet.

Fat is Fuel, Not Foe (Part 1)

Every day we are bombarded by marketing hype expressing how low-fat, low-calorie diets are the way to a healthier, leaner life. We are told to eat vegetable oils because saturated fat leads to heart disease. We are told that fat makes us fat, so limit it as much as possible. Just look at the old food pyramid, with fats & oils lumped together with sweets as the most limited food sources. Even in the new pyramid, there is a focus on limiting fat, and a recommendation to use soy, corn or canola oil if you must. Even with all of this focus on healthy eating, America sinks deeper and deeper into a world of disease, obesity, and medication. Maybe it is time that we question some of these long-standing “truths” about our nutrition. Over the next few weeks, we will explore some of the most common myths surrounding fat, and what you can do to start making healthier choices when it comes to your dietary fat.

Myth #1: Fat makes you fat.

This myth is linked to another myth that I have talked about before: that calories are all that matter when talking about weight. It is commonly thought (and taught) that if you eat less and move more, you will lose weight. Because fat has 9 calories per gram, it is often advised to just cut the fat as it will be the easiest way to remove calories. Even more common is replacing fat with carbohydrates. Carbs only have 4 calories per gram, so now you can get the same quantity of food (in grams) but with half the calories! Hurray!

Unfortunately, not all calories are created equal. Your weight and fat storage is going to depend MUCH more on how your body responds hormonally to a given food than to the amount of food you ingest. This is not new information either, though now the mechanics behind it are better known. In 1956, a study came out showing that while caloric restriction could lead to weight loss, there were strange results when the macronutrients were manipulated.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/28131415/Kekwick-Pawan-1956-Lancet

The researchers found a number of intriguing results. First, during a comparison of 1000 calorie diets, each comprised of 90% fat, protein, or carb, the results showed a significant difference in weight change based on food emphasis. The group consuming 90% fat lost the most weight with protein close behind, while the carb group actually GAINED weight.

Not only this, the researchers also found that when comparing a 2000 calorie diet that was balanced in its macronutrients to a 2600 calorie diet that was high in fat and protein, the higher calorie group lost more weight!

While this is just one study, it was one of the first to compare diets from the perspective of calories and macronutrient breakdown. As our understanding of hormones and their influence on fat storage and weight control continue to develop, these findings become less shocking. One of the most important hormones in regards to fat loss is insulin. It is very difficult to lose fat or weight when we have chronically high levels of insulin. Insulin is released in response to an increase in blood sugar (insulin signals cells to store sugar, therefore decreasing sugar in the blood), so the more carb-dense your diet, the more insulin you will produce. This is the underlying cause of type 2 diabetes. When blood sugar levels are chronically high, your cells eventually resist the message from insulin to open up and take in sugar. When this starts, your blood sugar increases even more because it has nowhere to go, and insulin production increases even more! So now you have a rapid increase in blood sugar and insulin, which can lead to an increased rate of fat storage. The only way to reverse this process is to cut the sugar (carbs), and allow your blood sugar to stabilize. Coincidentally (or maybe not so), the best way to keep your blood sugar stable is to have more fat in the diet!

So it seems the fat actually makes you skinny. This is not to say that carbs are not important, but there has to be a balance. If you are struggling with fat loss, take a look at how much sugar/artificial sweetener/starch you have in your diet and see if that would be a good place to start.