Lots of people get caught up in the minutiae. They want to know every possible new method of treating a disease/ curing an ailment/ etc, and pounce upon every single possible new theory in “science”.
What I contend in this article is that there are known responses of the human body towards certain stimuli, but very often we do not know exactly why. As a simple example, some people get sleepy after eating a big bowl of sugary cornflakes, other people get a sugar-rush.
Why? Well, it could be that the first person had better insulin sensitivity, it could be the activity done beforehand (like exercise), it could be because , amongst many other possibilities. But all we care is that the first person is unlikely to want a big bowl of cornflakes right before his/her finals exam.
All is fine when it comes to mundane items like this; who cares if you have to eat jello, dance on your head and take your lucky pen to do well in the exams. The problem is when we extend to a little more serious areas, like treating your ailment grandmother with heart disease.
The corollary from this is that there are many areas in which there simply isn’t enough research to make a very certain judgment call. The most important consideration is how certain the experts [1] are on how to act. Our first example is easily and absolutely resolved; don’t eat cornflakes when you don’t want to feel sleepy. But the second one, dealing with heart disease, is literally based upon our best guesses.
The issue here stems from 4 important factors:
- Science progresses by trial and error
- The human body, though complicated, generally shows predictable variance between individuals
- More research may be needed
- Bad journalism; mis-informed public
The result of this is the fact that some people try all sorts of things to solve their problem, very often without the background of expert knowledge. This has some serious consequences when dealing with the major health issues in today’s world.
The term ‘health issues’ is vague, and rightly so, since there are so many health issues in today’s world. The focus of this article is thus concentrated upon many popular issues of public (not scientific) debate centered around losing fat, fitness training, and heart disease.
To get the point across quickly, I give reference to various scientific studies in the article, but only comment on them in the ‘Notes:’ section after the article. For those who are interested, you can find the required comments there.
Losing fat to cure Obesity
I couldn’t be more obvious than that. Of course, your body doesn’t think that way. It thinks losing fat is bad on the whole, since it could potentially kill you if there was a sudden food shortage. 1000 years of industrialisation isn’t going to change 10 million years of evolution.
The next thing though, is the fact that losing fat isn’t at all a simple process. The fat has to be mobilised: taken out of storage for use. It then has to be transported to the cells which are capable of using it. And then it has to be converted into a form that can ultimately be used for energy. And of course, your body doesn’t think in terms of words, it communicates via various hormones. [2]
You on the other hand, don’t care about anything but getting the fat off. So why worry about the details of how you lose fat. Admittedly, not many people would worry about that in the way I have stated it here. But take a good look at today’s popular diets, and the one conclusion that you can draw is the fact that people believe that there is a certain way to lose fat; they believe that they know how the body loses fat.
This manifests itself in the various ideological (not scientific) viewpoints of the creators of many diets. Dr Atkins declared that carbs make you fat, not fat, subtract carbs and you lose fat. The same false dogma is uttered by Gary Taubes.
Dr Pritkin, imposed the opposite, fats are the enemy, carbs FTW! Still others, like the South Beach Diet talk about the body being sensitive to carbs at various times. Still more people think that eating low (Glycaemic Index) GI foods is the cure for obesity. Other people advocate high meal frequencies. Still others like the Velocity Diet limit the dieter to nothing but liquid meals. The list goes on.
There are two things these have in common. Firstly, all of them create a caloric deficit. And secondly, they all do so in a way that modulates people’s behaviour in order to create that deficit.
It bears repeating though, that these are ideologies, not scientifically backed theories. I’ll admit, that is a generalisation, and I am bound to find some fad diets which actually have some areas of scientific merit. However, I am safer, and more likely going to be correct if I assume the above.
These diets assume that the minutiae matters. We know from science that it doesn’t. Variables like the amounts of carbs or fat (protein is an exception), meal frequency, GI, inflammatory index, and what not are considered minutiae when it comes to losing fat. [3]
In this case, the idea is to not to worry about these. Instead, be guided by the general principles (link to fundamental conditions for fat loss) and let everything else fall into place.
Fitness Training – Getting Sexy
The same applies here.
The basic question raised is, “Do you think that any further improvements in our knowledge of physiology, energetics systems, and recovery is going to change the way we train athletes today?” The answer is: only at the fringes, namely the Olympic athletes of the field.
For the trainee not interested in attaining best-in-the-world standard [4], we can certainly say that there is that we know all there is to know about the methods used to achieve our goals.
For example, the primary stimulus for a muscle to grow bigger is progressive tension overload. In the gym, that translate to increasing the amount you can lift over time. You can run any sort of training cycle, be it high volume, low volume, drop sets, forced negatives and what not, but the condition remains the same.
In this case, we may be unsure of the exact mechanics of muscle stimulation, but history has shown that if you’re not getting stronger, you won’t be getting bigger [5].
This is another case whereby we shouldn’t sweat the small stuff at all. Stick to the basics.
Heart Disease [6]
However, with heart disease, I am of the opinion that we have to sweat the small stuff. The reason being that we have too many available possibilities.
With weight training, it was straightforward. Despite there being many arguments as to one method of training being superior to another, there seems to be a consistent observation, regardless of race, age, and other factors, that you have to lift more to get more tension on the muscle and thus to grow.
With heart disease, it isn’t that straightforward. Ethnicity, diet, age, genetics, and other lifestyle factors all come into play. We may know that the arteries get clogged, but unlike weight training, we cannot pin-point a single factor as to why the arteries clog up.
There are anecdotal reports of smokers staying heart-healthy and active people succumbing to heart failure, so what is the likely factor? Very likely, there is no one factor.
Because of the complications of the disease, our best bet is to review Every single bit of available data and use the most likely option.
The caveat is that there is no one best option, which many media outlets so often like to quote. Some recent examples from a random Google Search of the news: Is meditation a wonder cure for heart disease? , Heart Attack how to Cure One, Niacin Outperforms Drug in Artery Health.
To the empirical skeptic, these serve as added sources of information. To the casual reader, and would I highlight the 80-year-old man most prone to heart disease, these may represent revolutionary teachings on how to act to stop heart disease. And we always know where oversimplification leads to.
The problem remains: The body is complicated. Heart disease isn’t anywhere close to being solved yet. The media latches onto anything that could sell; they don’t have the time to understand the topic properly, and have stories to crank out. The casual reader believes this. [7]
With hard science, which studying heart attack is, we cannot know enough.
A Conclusion
I think the underlying problem lies in the lack of both knowledge and control that we have of a certain area.
As a rule of thumb, always judge the need for further analysis by the impact on your derived actions. As covered before, with losing fat and strength training, knowing exactly how the body works to achieve your goal state is not going to affect the way you diet/train. As for heart disease, maybe someday someone will discover X drug that inhibits all negative hormones and dissolves all the plague in your arteries. To know if this was worth investing your time and money (and life) in, you’d have to know the background and mechanics behind the drug and make a judgment call.
Or, you could trust an expert in the field, but we all know how controversial such a field may be.
The final note is to keep perspective. You cannot know everything in this world, and too many factors are at work. The too smartest things to do, are to experiment, and to accept the results.
—-
Notes:
[1] The medical field is one where there are experts; you need some pretty dam good background in experimental techniques and physiology to conduct a motor analysis of athletes for example.
[2] Anyone who is interested in how this works should definitely take a good read of ‘Dietary Fats, Prostaglandins and Hormones‘ by Casey Butt, as well as purchase ‘The Ultimate Diet 2.0′ by Lyle McDonald, which contains a semi-detailed analysis of the way the body uses fuels. Of course, there is also your standard 2000 page biochemistry textbook.
[3] Lyle McDonald did a research review examining the weight loss in groups of people following such diets, including the Ornish, Atkins, and Pritkins diets. He found nothing to indicate a superior diet outside of the caloric deficit they created.
With regards to meal frequency, many studies have shown varied results. Authors of ‘Fasting in School Children‘ stated that:
“We would have to learn their sociopsychologic, medical, and nutritional history to better understand their resilience to the effects of fasting” and concluded, “the data suggest, although inconclusively, that an overnight and morning fast among schoolchildren has adverse effects on attention and memory processes—effects that may be mediated by metabolic changes in plasma glucose regulation in the brain.”
Now, guess what a news reporter would have picked up?
But children are less likely to need adjustments to their meal frequency. The authors of ‘Fasting in Lean Men‘ concluded that insulin sensitivity and metabolic function was improved via an intermittent fasting regime. This mimics similar animal studies, such as the findings of the paper, ‘Fasting in the American Marten‘.
Hence, not only are there no adverse effects to altering meal frequency, there are potential benefits, such as the ones discussed in ‘Weight Loss is Greater with Consumption of Large Morning Meals and Fat-Free Mass Is Preserved with Large Evening Meals in Women on a Controlled Weight Reduction Regimen‘, whereby lean body mass was better preserved in dieters.
With regards to GI, Alan Aragon has done an extensive review of the efficacy of the Index itself. Lyle McDonald then raises the issue of the variance in GI in trained individuals vs sedentary ones. There has even been controversy that GI can be lowered because of high insulin, instead of low insulin. The logic there is that a high insulin response would cause blood glucose to dip faster and thus show up as a low GI.
Many confounds are present, but the result in the end is clear enough to say that GI is an insignificant (or at least redundant) parameter in the success of a fat loss diet.
[4] Your genetics will limit how far you can go, but that’s a topic for another time.
[5] There are 3 cases where this may not be absolutely true. The first is with complete beginners, whereby neural strength gains, basically the mind to muscle connection occurs pretty rapidly. The second is in the short term, whereby sarcoplasmic hypertrophy can occur. And the third is with anabolic steroids.
[6] My fondness for the topic of heart disease mainly comes from the fact that (a) it shows quite a large correlation to obesity, and (b) I know many who are afflicted by it (not very improbable considering the rates of heart disease in developed countries).
[7] I would like to emphasise that I do not count the technological improvements in surgical procedure. Those can be counted upon to deliver. Bear in mind the distinction between prevention and cure. Surgery deals with the latter, but the former is going to be the likely determinant of successful and permanent reduction in heart disease. The aphorism that “an ounce of prevention is equal to a pound of cure” isn’t far off. Neither does that discount the need for improvements in surgical methods.
Back to the topic, there are many takes on the prevention of heart disease. From research papers like ‘Are all n-3 polyunsaturated fats equal‘, to more interesting approaches like the ‘Polymeal and cardiovascular disease‘ and books like the ‘Sinatra solution‘. As usual, I fear the power of the last one the most, for it has the highest likelihood to be taken as gospel, when it could very well be flawed or more commonly, over-generalised.
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