We recently discussed how industrial seed oils, better known as vegetable oils, are dangerous to health and should as much as possible be eliminated from the diet of anyone who wants to stay healthy. For men, another danger of vegetable oils is that they promote low sperm counts and infertility.

Sperm counts are declining

It was recently reported that, in North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand, sperm counts have declined nearly 60% in about the last 40 years, between 1973 and 2011.

In contrast, no decline in sperm counts was seen in South America, Asia, and Africa, although far fewer studies have been performed in these regions.

The decline in sperm counts parallels the secular decline in testosterone.

To say that a 60% decline in sperm counts in the Western world is alarming is an understatement. Most European men may already be subfertile. Unless something is done about it, we could see a number of scenarios, such as (in the extreme case) extinction of Western peoples, or perhaps a return to a highly polygamous society in which fertile men take many wives and the infertile men get none, which in turn leads to a civilizational downgrade or perhaps revolution.

Why are sperm counts declining? There could be a number of reasons.

Obesity might be one reason, although scientists who have studied the secular decline in testosterone believe that obesity can’t account for (all of) it.

Estrogens in the water supply might be another: since the advent of the birth control pill, water has become full of estrogens due to their excretion from women taking them.

Another reason might be diet, which has changed greatly in the Western world over the past several decades.

One of the foodstuffs whose ingestion has massively increased is vegetable oil.

How vegetable oil impacts male fertility

Vegetable oil contains high amounts of omega-6 fatty acids, and their use in processed food means that people who eat it, as well as those who use vegetable oils for cooking at home, ingest large amounts of it. While small amounts of omega-6 fats are required for health, the amount ingested in the Western world may be 15 to 50 times higher than needed, leading to a very unbalanced omega-6/3 ratio.

To understand why ingestion of large amounts of omega-6 fats is so unhealthy, we need to understand the phenomenon of competition among fatty acids.

Proteins, which make up much of the body’s structure, are made using a fixed, invariant ratio and sequence of amino acids. While it’s possible to get inadequate dietary protein, it isn’t possible to alter the structure of the body’s own proteins.

Polyunsaturated fatty acids, most prominently the omega-6 and omega-3 fatty acids, are also structural, and form important components of cell membranes (phospholipids), as well as cell signaling molecules such as prostaglandins and thromboxanes.

In contrast to proteins, the dietary mix (ratio) of fatty acids determines the kind of fatty acids that are incorporated into cell membranes and cell signaling molecules. Therefore a higher intake of omega-6 fatty acids results in a higher concentration of them in cells.

So, in the past several decades, omega-6 fatty acids became incorporated into the cells of Western men (and women) to a much greater extent than before.

Men who were infertile due to a low sperm count had more than double the omega-6/3 ratio in blood and in spermatozoa as men who were fertile and normal.

Infertile men also had lower absolute levels of omega-3 fatty acids.

There was a strong negative correlation between omega-6/3 ratios in individual men and sperm count, sperm motility, and sperm morphology.

Other studies have found similar results.

Of course, correlation isn’t causation. But in rats, an increasing ratio of dietary omega-6/3 fatty acids leads to lower sperm counts, density, motility, and higher deformity.

A toxic byproduct of omega-6 fatty acids, 4-hydroxynonenal, increases reactive oxygen species and damages human spermatozoa. The authors of this study suggest, “If such spermatozoa successfully fertilize the egg, then this may explain the rise in lymphoma and leukemia in children of smoking fathers.”

Infertile men were given omega-3 supplements in the form of fish oil, at ~2 grams omega-3 daily, or a placebo. Sperm count and density significantly and substantially (about 50%) increased in the omega-3 group.

The omega-6/3 ratio “is of utmost importance in male in maintaining normal sperm integrity and function.” Many studies bear this out.

Is the decline in sperm counts in the West due to increased vegetable oil consumption?

Vegetable oil intake has increased massively

Check out the following chart, which shows the availability of added dietary fat in the U.S.

Vegetable oil consumption has increased massively. Soybean oil alone supplies 20% of calories to the median U.S. diet. That means about 9% of calories are pure omega-6 fatty acids (linoleic acid).

Vegetable oil consumption parallels the decline in sperm counts.

Why has consumption increased so much? Mainly, because they told us to use it.

Who’s they? Our “health” authorities, including in the medical and scientific establishments and the U.S. government.

They told us to use a wholly unnatural, highly processed oil instead of mother nature’s butter and olive oil. Health establishment fail.

What men can do to maintain high fertility

Vegetable oils, aka industrial seed oils, are used in processed, fast, and junk food of all kinds. If you eat at a fast food joint, your fries are cooked in them. At a Mexican joint, your tortilla chips. At a fancy restaurant (or at home), your salad is doused with them.

Virtually any kind of processed or packaged food you get at a supermarket contains vegetable oil.

The first step in maintaining high fertility is to avoid vegetable oils as much as possible. If added fat is desired, use butter, lard, coconut oil, ghee, or olive oil.

We’ve seen above that omega-3 supplementation can improve fertility, and it does this by decreasing the omega-6/3 ratio. Therefore, decreasing the amount of omega-6 fatty acids alone may be enough to maintain and/or improve fertility. That being said, a decent fish oil supplement can be of value in male fertility.

Conclusion

As with so many other areas in health, the mainstream health advice with regard to the type of fats everyone should eat have turned out to be disastrous for male fertility.

The advice emanating from the medical and scientific establishment and the government has helped to bring on the obesity and diabetes epidemics as well. They want virtually everyone on statins, which lower testosterone.

They used to laugh about “precious bodily fluids”, but the phrase turned out to be eerily prescient.

Don’t trust anything they say.

PS: For more of my contrarian takes on health, check out my site, Rogue Health and Fitness.

If you enjoyed this story, please recommend and share to help others find it! Feel free to leave a comment below.

The Mission publishes stories, videos, and podcasts that make smart people smarter. You can subscribe to get them here.

Vegetable Oils Promote Male Infertility was originally published in Mission.org on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Aging means a deterioration in the body and an increased likelihood of breakdown and disease. Scientists who study aging are keen to discover the driving forces that cause it, but they often seem to be unable to distinguish between aging in itself and poor health, especially when studying human beings. I believe that much of aging is just poor health habits.

Is gaining fat, losing muscle, or developing insulin resistance and diabetes a normal part of aging?

Aging

Obviously, virtually all living things age and die. (“Virtually” because a few living things appear not to age at all.) While aging is a natural process, so infectious and genetic diseases are natural processes too, and we’ve largely discovered how to deal with the first, and are working on the second. There’s no reason that aging can’t be delayed or even abolished; it’s not necessarily inevitable.

Some manifestations of aging are visible, such as grey hair and wrinkled skin, and don’t seem obviously related to lifestyle or health habits, so far as we know. Dysfunction on the cellular level is not visible, but it takes place in aging.

Scientists often consider that in humans, aging causes obesity, muscle loss, and diabetes. For example, “studies have shown that insulin resistance increases with age, independent of changes in total adiposity.” Yet the same study concluded its results by saying, “These results suggest that insulin resistance is more closely associated with abdominal adiposity than with age.”

Similarly, sarcopenia, or loss of muscle, is considered a part of aging. Yet exercise, especially resistance training, and higher dietary protein, robustly fight the loss of muscle, so sarcopenia can’t be entirely due to aging.

Fasting, calorie restriction, and aging

Valter Longo, the well-known USC scientist who has studied intermittent and prolonged fasting and their effects on aging, believes that fasting has been shown to have profound effects on aging. Yet, as I pointed out, his studies in humans leave something to be desired, since most of the people in his studies were overweight and/or sedentary. We don’t know how much of the benefits of fasting seen in these people are due to fighting aging or are due simply to better health.

Similarly, domestic lab animals have a tendency towards obesity, since they eat highly refined, processed food and are confined to cages. In calorie-restriction studies on these animals, much of the benefits to their health may be due merely to preventing them from becoming obese, and not due to a true anti-aging effect.

Metformin

Scientists consider metformin, the most-prescribed anti-diabetes drug, and rapamycin, an immunosuppressant, to be the best leading candidates for drugs that will actually slow, prevent, or even reverse aging. A clinical trial (a trial using humans) of metformin to see its effects on aging is currently underway.

Yet the participants in this trial are “older adults with impaired glucose tolerance”; that is, these people are pre-diabetic.

We know that type 2 diabetes is caused by, or closely associated with, obesity, dietary sugar and refined carbohydrates, and a lack of exercise.

How many of the participants in the metformin clinical trial are obese and/or eat lots of garbage food and don’t exercise? My guess is a very large fraction of them.

Metformin is effective at treating diabetics; it decreases blood sugar and insulin. But if metformin helps the people in the clinical trial, it won’t tell us anything about aging. They’re not healthy, and nothing leads us to think that their ill health is caused by aging rather than bad food, obesity, and lack of exercise.

Metformin may not help people who are lean and healthy and eat good food.

The only way we know if an anti-aging treatment works is if it helps people already healthy.

Everyone is fat

Some 70% of the American people are overweight or obese, although I’ve argued that the figure is closer to 80% when body fat is taken into account. Excess body fat accelerates aging. So does muscle loss.

The causes of this sad state of affairs are many. One is that people don’t know what to do, and if they go to a doctor to ask, he or she doesn’t know either. “Eat less and move more” is terrible advice for many reasons, but seems to be about the only piece of doctors give. Another reason is that even when doctors know, most people won’t do much about it. It’s too hard to give up sugar, much less lift weights.

Whatever the causes, aging isn’t synonymous with obesity, diabetes, and sarcopenia.

Conclusion

Scientists confuse aging with poor health. They overlap but aren’t the same. Until anti-aging treatments extend the lives of healthy animals and humans, we don’t know if they truly work.

Much of Aging Is Just Poor Health Habits was originally published in Better Humans on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The aim of the Deep Soy State is the subjugation of any masculine element that poses a threat to its power.

I joked the other day on Twitter about the Deep Soy State. (I can’t take credit for the expression; someone else whom I can’t now remember coined it.)

It may not be an actual conspiracy, but it might as well be. The environment around us is now constructed in such a way that unless you take active steps to avoid it, you will be caught in the web of junk food, sugar, soy, anti-meat propaganda, and statins that leads to obesity, flabbiness, low testosterone, and a general decline in both masculinity and health.

Not to mention the pervasive anti-male bias of mainstream culture.

The Daily Caller on Twitter

Princeton Hangs Signs In School Gym Warning 'Strength Is NOT Masculine' https://t.co/YeOW33WJva

Personally, that kind of thing provides me with more motivation than ever.

You can see the results of this all around you:

a combined rate of overweight and obesity that approaches 80%, higher than the official figure, bad enough in itself, of 70%;

men who have lost their zest for life;

a secular decline in testosterone levels;

28% of Americans over the age of 40 taking statins, which promote diabetes, muscle weakness, and memory loss — that figure is likely higher for men, since they get statin prescriptions more often than women.

All of this is the environment that surrounds you, and unless you take active steps to strike out on your own, to create your own environment, it will grasp you in its clutches, leading to ill health, low energy, and dissatisfaction with life.

Big Food, Big Pharma, and a pervasive sense of self-entitlement conspire to make you fat and lazy and complacent.

You must go your own way.

The Health Environment

You get together with friends, and they think pizza, soda, and cookies are perfectly acceptable food.

You go out shopping, or to the park, and everyone is eating all the time. Even at your workplace, constant eating.

You see your doctor for a checkup, and he tells you to eat a low-fat diet and threatens a statin prescription.

And even at the gym, most of the peeps are doing cardio, which does nothing to prevent muscle loss with aging, or to prevent obesity.

Avoiding the conventional wisdom has never been more important. I actually feel sorry for men and women who don’t know better, who believe the mainstream, and end up obese, flabby, and on a statin, or with diabetes.

P. D. Mangan 🇺🇸 on Twitter

Fruit juice is liquid sugar and little more. https://t.co/Q0Rw2zaTOk

Avoiding Deep Soy

If you want to be or stay lean and muscular, maintain your energy and your potency, and avoid being placed on ineffective or even dangerous medications, most of what I’ve written on this website is relevant. My point here, however, is that everything around you conspires to rob you of your health and masculinity.

Using the Pareto principle that 20% of inputs give 80% of the results, here’s what I believe is most important:

P. D. Mangan 🇺🇸 on Twitter

Cut the carbs and sugar, and lift weights. The rest is commentary.

Avoid the industrial, processed crap food that’s everywhere. This will take some effort. You’ll need to cook and eat most of your food at home. You may need to educate yourself not only in what’s healthy to eat, but also in how mainstream medicine and nutrition has gone wrong, so that you can be reassured that what you’re doing is healthy, and to give yourself the resolve to tread your own path. The main things you need to avoid are:

• sugar
• refined carbohydrates
• vegetable oils

Avoiding them is harder than it looks, because virtually all processed and fast food is loaded with them

Lift weights. No other form of exercise fights aging, low testosterone, and lack of self-confidence like weightlifting. No other form of exercise makes you look better.

Lift weights with consistency and before long, all the peeps will be ‘mirin’. I see this all the time. On the internet, it’s easy to find men my age who look better and are built better than me, but in real life, it’s next to impossible.

If you want to look like the average person around you — obese, no muscle, sad — then do what they do. Succumb to environmental pressure. Conform.

If you want to look and be different, you need… discipline.

The discipline to create your own environment.

The discipline to work out when you may not feel like it.

The discipline to say “No!”

The discipline to say “Yes!”

So go grab your battle axe and start swinging, and ignore what the crowd wants you to do.

Jocko Willink on Twitter

BATTLE-AXE? https://t.co/PjcsYuDGnY

My book Muscle Up will help you on your way out of conformity and into a much better world.

The Deep Soy State was originally published in Mission.org on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Cancer is the second leading cause of death in the U.S., and is one of the most dreaded diseases anywhere. It typically strikes older people more; some 90% of cancer is diagnosed in people over the age of 50, and incidence increases with age.

While many of the causes of cancer have been identified, the exact manner in which cancer starts and why it does so remains an open question in science. While the lay person may consider the origin of cancer to be of academic interest only, the way that cancer starts, and even precisely what cancer is, has great relevance to prevention and treatment. A new line of thought on cancer has emerged in recent years, backed by compelling evidence, that the prevalent theory of how cancer starts and what it is are wrong, at least in part.

This new way of looking at the problem is the metabolic theory of cancer.

Is cancer caused by genetic mutations?

The prevailing theory of cancer is that it’s caused by genetic mutations, which lead to uncontrolled growth, metastasis, and death. The Mayo Clinic flatly states, “Cancer is caused by changes (mutations) to the DNA within cells.” A scholarly review, The Hallmarks of Cancer, argues that the “enabling characteristic” for these hallmarks of cancer is “genome instability”, that is, the increased propensity of the cell’s genes to mutate.

But seemingly, there’s a paradoxically low rate of mutations together with a high rate of cancer. Even the authors of the review cited above state:

But mutation of specific genes is an inefficient process, reflecting the unceasing, fastidious maintenance of genomic integrity by a complex array of DNA monitoring and repair enzymes. These genome maintenance teams strive to ensure that DNA sequence information remains pristine… Yet cancers do appear at substantial frequency in the human population, causing some to argue that the genomes of tumor cells must acquire increased mutability in order for the process of tumor progression to reach completion in several decades time.

Mutations are rare, they say, because cells strive to repair their DNA, but cancer occurs frequently.

There are a number of other paradoxes of cancer.

The discovery that cancer cells collectively manifest millions of different types of gene mutations led to the idea that all cancers were different, or different in type, and required complex treatment.

But what if cancer cells all had a remarkable similarity, one that had nothing to do with genetic mutations?

The Warburg effect

Otto Warburg, who won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1931, first proposed that cancer is due to a metabolic defect.

Just as there are many remote causes of plague, heat, insects, rats, but only one common cause, the plague bacillus, there are a great many remote causes of cancer-tar, rays, arsenic, pressure, urethane- but there is only one common cause into which all other causes of cancer merge, the irreversible injuring of respiration.

In most normal cells, energy is burned in the mitochondria in the presence of oxygen to produce ATP, the currency of energy. Cancer cells have a severely diminished, or no, capacity to do this. Instead, they burn glucose for energy in a process known as aerobic glycolysis. The mitochondria of cancer cells appear to be severely damaged, so the only way they can obtain energy is through this alternative and relatively inefficient method.

Cancer cells burn glucose, as opposed to the mixture of fat and glucose burned by normal cells. Furthermore, non-cancerous normal cells can use ketone bodies for energy, and most cancer cells cannot.

Cancer as a metabolic disease

If genetic mutations don’t cause cancer, what does?

Thomas Seyfried, the most well-known scientist in this area, postulates that cancer is a metabolic disease.

In Seyfried’s view, metabolic dysfunction in the mitochondria of cancer cells is the initial event in cancer formation. The result is genomic instability, leading to the gene mutations seen in cancer; but the mutations are not causal, the metabolic dysfunction is.

Cancer cells burn sugar as a result of their dysfunction.

Therefore, treatment partially consists of depriving cancer cells of glucose. One way to do that is to lower blood glucose levels by the ketogenic diet. In fact, Seyfried has advocated just this approach. It appears to be effective, though much more clinical research would need to be done.

2-deoxyglucose, a compound that is taken up by cells but which cannot be metabolized, and which essentially jams up the metabolic machinery, inhibits cancer cells in vitro. So it appears that depriving cancer cells of glucose, their main fuel, inhibits their growth and may kill them.

Is there any other way to jam the molecular machinery of cancer cells?

Inhibiting cancer metabolism

Enter Dr. Laurent Schwartz, French physician and oncologist, who has been working on this problem for many years and treats patients using the metabolic theory of cancer. (In addition to conventional treatment.)

Schwartz and colleagues have developed a compound called Metabloc, which consists of two over-the-counter (in the U.S. at least) supplements, hydroxycitrate and alpha lipoic acid. These two compounds interfere with the metabolism of cancer cells, but have little effect on the metabolism of normal cells. Below is a chart showing various strengths of both compounds either alone or in combination against cancer cells in vitro. The highest concentrations of the combination, though still in the micromolar range, reduced cancer cell viability to zero, i.e. no surviving cells.

This treatment, in contrast to standard cancer treatment, is non-toxic, with few side effects.

In vivo, in mice, the combination works too, greatly inhibiting tumor growth. Interestingly, adding another common compound, capsaicin, the substance that gives hot chili peppers their heat, inhibited cancer cells even more. The addition of a fourth compound, a peptide drug called octreotide, further diminished cancer cell viability. Octreotide is a potent inhibitor of growth hormone.

Schwartz has published several papers on the effects in actual patients; the most recent (as far as I know) is “Combination of Metabolic Treatment of Aggressive Primary Brain Tumour and Multiple Metastases of the Brain”.

Background: The combination of hydroxycitrate and lipoic acid has been demonstrated by several laboratories to be effective in reducing murine cancer growth. In previous article in 2014, we reported the fate of 11 patients treated for metastatic cancer unresponsive to chemotherapy. As of today, 32 months after inclusion, five of these patients (45%) are still alive.

Patients and Methods: We report the cases of 12 patients with advanced brain tumor. They were all treated with conventional treatment and a combination of sodium R lipoate (800 mg bid), hydroxycitrate at 500 mg tid and low-dose naltrexone at 5 mg at bedtime. Eight patients had primary brain tumour (n=8 including five glioblastomas) four patients had multiple brain metastases.

Results and Discussion: The combination of conventional and metabolic treatment was well tolerated. Four out of five patients with gliobastoma are still alive and well. The longest follow-up is 7 years.The four patients with disease widely metastatic to the brain have experienced long-term survival. A randomized clinical trial of metabolic treatment associated with conventional treatment is warranted.

The conclusion of the paper states:

To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to treat cancer using a combination of molecules targeting abnormal cancer metabolism. None of these patients experienced major side effects of metabolic treatment. At this stage of development, not a single case proves the efficacy of treatment. But at the time of writing, most patients were alive and well several months after having been sent home to await their death. Several months of life without symptoms strongly suggests that targeting cancer metabolism may be a reasonable option in therapy of advanced brain cancer. The role of metabolic treatment and its association with existing therapy remains to be explored in well-conducted trials.

The end of cancer?

It’s obviously too soon to say whether this new treatment for cancer will be so much of a success that the treatment becomes widely accepted and used. Dr. Schwartz is apparently the only oncologist in the world who is using it. His new book is “Cancer: Un Traitement Simple et Non Toxique.”

The number of cancers is increasing and, despite what we hear about medical progress, mortality has not dropped since 1960 , especially for tumors of the pancreas, lungs, liver, brain …

And if, instead of merely seeking to destroy cancer cells with aggressive treatments, they were also rendered functional again? This approach can improve the effectiveness of chemotherapy and the survival of patients.

This is the conviction of Dr. Laurent Schwartz, shared by many scientists around the world. This brilliant physician and researcher in cancer has spent his career gathering evidence that the mechanisms that cause cells to multiply in an anarchic way are essentially related to a sugar burning problem .

In this book written for patients and caregivers, he proposes to normalize the metabolism of cancer cells by a combination of non-toxic and inexpensive foods and supplements, or even a diet low in carbohydrates.

This metabolic treatment has already benefited many patients.

I can only say that if I had cancer, I would seek out the expertise of Laurent Schwartz. He appears to be little known in the U.S., but his latest book will be translated into English and published here. It’s also being translated into Spanish and Italian.

While Dr. Schwartz has patented Metabloc, the fact that it’s comprised of two OTC supplements means it’s cheap and that huge pharmaceutical industry profits can’t be made on this treatment. That’s an obstacle to it becoming more widely adopted, since cancer treatment is big business.

Ever since Dr. Kenneth Cooper introduced the concept of aerobics, we’ve been conditioned to believe that steady-state exercise at a moderate pace is the best, perhaps only, way to increase cardiorespiratory fitness. Jogging, treadmills, and the like, done for 30 minutes or more at a time, have been deemed best. So, lots of people have spent countless hours doing these things, but it increasingly looks like they spent lots more time than they need have. The question is, why are you still jogging? High-intensity interval training makes fitness fast, much faster than jogging or other aerobic exercise. It’s simply more efficient.

High-Intensity Interval Training

High-intensity interval training (I wrote about it here), abbreviated HIIT (or HIT), uses the intensity of exercise as the most important variable. Instead of steady-state, moderate-intensity exercise, HIIT has you going all-out for brief periods of time, followed by a short rest period, then another brief, all-out bout — and so on. While the exercise done in HIIT is much more intense, it’s also much shorter in time.

It’s been known for some time that HIIT is effective at increasing fitness, but what we would like to know is how it compares to moderate-intensity, steady-state exercise in that regard. Does it increase fitness as much?

To answer that, a group led by Martin Gibala, the exercise physiologist whose name has become linked to high-intensity exercise, studied a group of young sedentary men.

Half the men did sprint-cycle interval training, consisting of three 20-second all-out bouts of stationary cycling, interspersed with two minutes of low-intensity cycling.

Half the men did moderate-intensity cycling at 70% of their maximum heart rate, for 45 minutes.

Both groups worked out 3 times a week for 12 weeks.

According to standard exercise dogma, the moderate-intensity cyclists should have improved their fitness more. After all, they were doing aerobics (“cardio”), the HIIT exercisers were doing mainly anaerobic training, and took a lot less time.

Results

1. Peak oxygen uptake, a direct measure of cardiorespiratory fitness, increased 19% in both groups.
2. Insulin sensitivity increased similarly in both groups, 4.9 in HIIT, 5.0 in moderate-intensity (no significant difference).
3. Muscle mitochondrial content increased similarly in both groups.

The high-intensity group worked out a total of one minute per session, 3 x 20 seconds, with a total time commitment of 10 minutes per session when warm-up and time between all-out bouts are included. The moderate-intensity group worked out for 45 minutes — or 50 minutes with warm-up and cool-down periods.

No more time excuse

The number one reason people give for not exercising is lack of time. This study shows that in less than 30 minutes a week, you can get in great shape. The aerobic, moderate-intensity group spent 2.5 hours a week to get the same results.

If you make your warm-up and cool-down periods shorter, as well as the intervals between bouts, you could get in shape in probably 15 minutes a week.

It’s intense

High-intensity interval training is intense. You have to give it everything you’ve got in those 3, 20-second intervals. For that reason, some people find it unpleasant.

Personally, I don’t find it unpleasant at all. However, I do enjoy walking as a form of low-intensity exercise. If you want to, you could certainly do both. Just keep in mind that if you do both, walking doesn’t generate the kind of intensity that increases the 3 indices of fitness: peak oxygen uptake, insulin sensitivity, and muscle mitochondria. You need to get over a threshold of intensity before that happens.

Aerobics dogma overturned

This study, along with others of a similar nature, shows you don’t need long hours of exercise to increase cardiorespiratory fitness. I think it also shows that, just as with lifting weights, intensity is the most important exercise variable.

Not volume. Intensity.

Exercise intensity lies on a continuum, from low (walking) to middle (jogging) to high (high-intensity intervals). Getting more fit depends on exceeding an intensity that makes your body work harder than it’s used to.

If you exercise with low to medium intensity and become fitter, the only ways to increase your fitness are to a) increase the amount of time exercising, or b) increase the intensity. Most people choose an increase in time, and some who want to get very fit end up spending hours and hours a week exercising. That’s not necessary. In HIIT, you are always working at the threshold of your physiological ability. So long as you exert the utmost effort when you do it, you will always be getting fitter without an increase in exercise time.

Overtraining

If you do another form of exercise, such as lifting weights, you should be aware that if you combine it with HIIT, it could be easy to get into a state of overtraining. I can attest to this myself. HIIT workouts ideally ought to be treated as a separate workout, separated from another by at least a day. Too much exercise isn’t healthy and your enjoyment of the rest of your life will decline due to fatigue. Of course, the amount of training an individual can handle varies based on age, current condition, diet, sleep, and other factors.

The exercise of the future?

Ever since the concept of aerobics came about, we’ve been stuck in a paradigm that the only way to increase fitness and decrease the risk of disease, especially heart disease, is to exercise aerobically. Is it a coincidence that the rise of aerobics coincides with the rise of the obesity epidemic? I don’t think it is a coincidence, although obviously other factors are involved.

Now that we know that long hours of plodding are not necessary for fitness and for protection against heart attacks, HIIT could be the wave of the future.

I’ve already embraced it thoroughly — and I used to be a distance runner.

High-Intensity Interval Training Makes Fitness Fast was originally published in Better Humans on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Is grass-fed beef worth the money? Grass-fed anything?

Why grass-fed whey protein is not worth extra money

Grass-fed animals — in this case, cows — produce meat and milk that has a different fatty acid profile from animals that are grain-fed. In particular, omega-6 fatty acids are lower, and omega-3 fatty acids are higher; this is a much more beneficial fatty acid profile than from grain-fed animals.

So, if it’s more beneficial for health, what’s the problem with grass-fed whey? Whey has virtually no fat in it; it’s pure protein. You end up paying a lot of extra money for no benefit.

It’s a typical health food scam, IMO.

Grass-fed beef

Grass-fed beef, as noted above, contains lower levels of omega-6 fatty acids. These are the same types of polyunsaturated fats found in vegetable oils and that raise inflammation. An unbalanced ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 may lie behind many chronic diseases; our paleolithic ancestors may have had a 1: 1 ratio; in the modern world, we may have 15:1 or higher. Decreasing omega-6 fats is definitely a good thing.

So why do I question whether grass-fed beef, with lower omega-6 fatty acids, is worth it? Don’t we want to be healthy?

To answer that, check out the graph I made, below. It shows the content of omega-6 fats in grass-fed beef, grain-fed beef, and chicken. Data are from Self Nutrition Data.

The type of beef used in the chart is ground, 70% lean, per 100 grams (just under 1/4 pound) of meat. Grass-fed beef has about 28% less omega-6 than grain-fed. Chicken has a whopping 6 to 7-fold more than either of them.

Now let’s look at omega-3 fats, the beneficial fat that most people don’t get enough of. For comparison, I’ve added salmon to the graph.

Grass-fed beef has more omega-3 than grain-fed, but it’s dwarfed by salmon.

What can we conclude from this?

If you eat chicken with any frequency, say once a week, grass-fed beef will not decrease the amount of omega-6 fats that you consume. The chicken in your diet will overwhelm any decrease in omega-6 from eating grass-fed beef.

If you eat any salmon at all — and this is generally true for eating any type of fatty fish — you would get a far greater amount of omega-3 fats than from grass-fed beef.

Using the Pareto principle — that 20% of the inputs yield 80% of the benefits — you’d be better off giving up chicken and eating salmon regularly, say, once or twice a week. Furthermore, a teaspoon of cod liver oil has about 1000 mg of omega-3 fats; since I don’t eat fish regularly, I supplement with fish oil.

If you eat no chicken — and importantly, eat nothing made with vegetable oil — and you eat fish regularly, and you have a lot of cash, then go ahead and buy the grass-fed beef. Otherwise, as I’ve shown above, you’d be better off making the other changes I noted.

Eating grass-fed beef is like a man with a pot belly trying to improve his attractiveness by buying a sports car. While a sports car improves his attractiveness, he’d be better off getting rid of his belly first before he goes and blows a bunch of money on a car.

Hormones and antibiotics

Added: Some people object that grass-fed beef contains less or no antibiotics and hormones.

Regarding antibiotics: Antibiotic residue testing in meat results in few positive samples. Upshot: antibiotics are rapidly metabolized, and animals must go through a withdrawal period before slaughter. Unacceptable levels of antibiotics are found in less than 1% of inspected meat.

Regarding hormones, most foods have much larger amounts of estrogens than beef. See table below:

To my mind, the same principles apply as for fatty acids. The value added from a much more expensive product isn’t worth it — not to me, anyway.

Is Grass-Fed Beef Worth the Money? was originally published in Better Humans on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A recurring theme in research on aging is that of growth vs longevity. In essence, they’re opposed: more growth means shorter life, and less growth means longer life. The activation of physiological mechanisms in growth promotes aging, and deactivating them promotes longevity. Big animals die younger.

Evidence in non-human animals

Between species, larger animals tend to live longer. Elephants live longer than mice, who live longer than flies and worms. Mikhail Blagosklonny, the noted scientist who studies aging, sums it up as “Big mice die young but large animals live longer“.

As the article says, within species, larger animals die younger. Small mice live longer than big mice, because they grow less.

Why do larger animals, between species, live longer? Larger animals have fewer predators and low rates of accidental death; therefore, natural selection has worked on them to evolve longer lives, with more robust anti-aging mechanisms. In contrast, if the average mouse is dead at two years of age from predation or other accidents of life, then there’s nothing for natural selection to work on.

Calorie restriction is the most robust life-extension intervention known to science. Animals live longer when their food is restricted. The causes of this are hotly debated, but one theory is that since food promotes growth, restricting food hinders growth and extends life. Even when animals are fully grown, food activates the growth mechanism and effectively shortens life.

Evidence in humans

There’s a lot of evidence that larger humans die younger.

Obesity by definition means higher than normal body fat and thus higher body weight. The adverse health effects of obesity are well known.

Even when body fat remains the same, however, larger size appears to mean shorter life.

Among professional baseball players, larger size was strongly correlated to a lower age at death. See graph below.

Note that BMI for all the baseball players is quite similar, so age at death was not related to being overweight, but to total body weight and height. Taller players died younger.

Among different ethnic groups in California, death rates correspond to their average body mass index, in order from lowest to highest: Asian Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Hispanic, White, African-American. (Hispanics actually weight the most of these groups, evidence for the Hispanic health paradox.)

Among Olympic athletes, those who set records at younger ages died younger. “Early and extraordinary peaks in physical performance come with a longevity cost“.

Life history theory postulates a trade-off between development and maintenance. This trade-off is observed when comparing life histories of different animal species. In humans, however, it is debated if variation in longevity is explained by differences in developmental traits. Observational studies found a trade-off between early and high fecundity and longevity in women. Development encompasses more than fecundity and also concerns growth and physical performance. Here, we show a life history trade-off between early and above average physical performance and longevity in male Olympic athletes. Athletes who peaked at an earlier age showed 17-percent increased mortality rates and athletes who ranked higher showed 11-percent increased mortality rates. Male athletes who had both an early and extraordinary peak performance suffered a 4.7-year longevity cost. This is the first time a life history trade-off between physical performance and longevity has been found in humans. This finding deepens our understanding of early developmental influences on the variation of longevity in humans.

The authors say, “It is important to note that cocaine was available since the first Olympic games and could have played a role in the association.” I’ve never heard before of Olympic athletes using cocaine, but that would certainly shorten lives. I suppose it’s completely unknown how many athletes used it.

Basketball players, who are of course much taller than average, don’t seem to live very long. Anecdotally,

Within the past year, the NBA has seen a spate of deaths among some of its notable retired big men — among them Moses Malone, Darryl Dawkins and Anthony Mason, none older than 60.

And now Larry Bird admits, he doesn’t expect to live to a ripe old age.

Another piece of evidence: women live longer than men, and women are smaller.

Kitavans, Okinawans, and Cretans

The people of Kitava, Okinawa, and Crete are famous for better health and longer lives. Their diets and lifestyles have been extensively studied and have given rise to concepts like the Mediterranean and Okinawan diets, the Blue Zones, and the importance of religion and social ties for health and longevity.

What seems to have escaped many researchers is that these people are all small.

Kitavans show no evidence of heart disease or strokes and cancer appears to be rare. Young Kitavan men average 125 lbs (57 kg), and Kitavan men over the age of 60 average 107 lbs (49 kg). Kitavan women are also small. By the way, 80% of Kitavans smoke, yet appear to be in excellent health.

Okinawa has a high number of centenarians. The average male Okinawan centenarian weighs 97 lbs (44 kg); the average female centenarian weighs 81 lbs (36.7 kg). (ibid.)

The average man in Crete has a BMI of 22.8, the lowest of any surrounding Mediterranean communities, and they have the lowest death rate. “Cretans have 1/2 the all-cause and <1/20 coronary heart disease (CHD) mortality of larger northern Europeans.” (ibid.)

If size has such a large correlation to death rate, it makes me wonder how important the diets or other lifestyle factors of these people are. Maybe we’ve been looking at the wrong things, and all along it’s been their size that’s the most important. Of course, their diets affect how large they grow too.

Centenarians

Centenarians are on average short. In a group of Italian centenarians, average height was 156 cm, or 5’1.4″. “Mean values for height and weight of nonagenarians and centenarians were at the lower percentile values of the distributions reported for elderly American and European subjects…” Height was calculated using a formula based on knee height, so that spinal shrinkage did not influence results.

Okinawan centenarians are of “short stature”. In another group of centenarians, women were on average 2.5 cm (1 inch) shorter than controls, but men were not shorter.

It also appears to be trivially easy to find examples of long-lived short people. For example, just the other day the NY Times ran an article about Robert Marchand, the now-celebrated 105-year-old Frenchman who keeps breaking cycling records. It turns out that M. Marchand is 5’0″ tall, and weighs 115 lbs. Salustiano Sanchez, who once held the rank of world’s oldest man, and who died at age 112, was nicknamed “Shorty”.

Why?

So, there seems to be good evidence, both human and animal, that larger and/or taller humans and animals have shorter lives. Noted aging researcher Luigi Fontana has calculated that “risks of developing type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and several types of cancer” are lowest at a BMI of 21 to 22, and rise from there.

Why is there an inverse relation between growth and longevity?

One answer centers on mTOR, the cellular growth controller. When mTOR is activated after maturity, physiological reactions occur that promote aging. This is the “quasi-programmed” theory of aging. mTOR is necessary for growth and development, but continues in a mindless loop afterwards, accelerating aging.

Interventions that inhibit constitutive activation of mTOR are either good for health or extend lifespan:

• resveratrol
• rapamycin
• lower iron levels
• calorie restriction
• intermittent fasting
• curcumin
• metformin and berberine.

Interventions and conditions that promote mTOR constitutive activation are detrimental to longevity:

• obesity
• growth hormone supplementation. Acromegaly, or excess growth hormone, results in a 2 to 3-fold higher death rate.
• anabolic steroids
• insulin resistance.

However, an attribute like height is under strong genetic control, so it’s safe to say that genes have a lot to do with the growth vs longevity effect.

On the other hand, heights have increased over the past two centuries. Italian conscripts increased in height by about 5 inches from 1854 to 1963, and current rates of height increase are from 10 to 30 mm a decade. That increase must be environmental, and could be due to better nutrition and fewer childhood diseases.

What to do about it

You can’t control your height, so what can you do about this association?

1. Stay lean with a good, muscular body composition and low body fat.
2. Use some of the interventions listed above, such as resveratrol, intermittent fasting, and dumping iron.

That’s about it. Having good body composition will ensure that you don’t have insulin resistance. Essentially, all of these things go together: insulin sensitivity, normal rhythms of autophagy, and good body composition. mTOR inhibits autophagy, the cellular self-cleansing process which is so critical to aging.

Beyond that, anti-aging treatments that inhibit mTOR are underway. You can already get metformin if you find the right doctor, although OTC berberine might be as good. Rapamycin is a promising anti-aging drug that’s being extensively studied, although it has its downsides. It seems possible that pulse dosing of rapamycin, perhaps once weekly, could have anti-aging effects without many of the downsides. Mikhail Blagosklonny believes that “rapamycin will become the cornerstone of anti-aging therapy in our life time”.

PS: Check out my books, Dumping Iron, Muscle Up, and Stop the Clock.

Why Do Big Animals Die Younger? was originally published in Mission.org on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It’s common for people who have lived a long time to divulge their “longevity secrets”, but in most cases neither they nor anyone else really knows what the answers to their long lives are. In some cases, centenarians attribute their long life to their vices. Could there be a coffee, whiskey, and cigars longevity diet? Or, as a wag put it: The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms — Longevity Edition.

Look at this man: 107-year-old U.S. veteran says he owes longevity to cigars, whiskey and ‘staying out of trouble’. Richard Overton, the veteran in question, is now 110. Here’s a National Geographic video about him. He’s the oldest living veteran of World War II.

I’m going to make the case here that Mr. Overton’s lifestyle has something to do with his long life.

How he lives

Here’s what I gathered from several articles and videos about Richard Overton:

• He still drives — a Ford pickup
• He owns a lot of guns
• If he wakes up at 2 o’clock in the morning, he just gets up
• He drinks up to 4 cups of coffee in the morning
• He adds bourbon whiskey to his coffee
• He smokes cigars, perhaps 10 a day.
• He’s very active in his church
• Has a 91-year-old girlfriend
• He’s lean
• He avoids stress — he’s easy going and says he’s stayed out of trouble

How his lifestyle contributes to his longevity

He’s lean and he fasts

I”m beginning to think that drinking coffee and whiskey and smoking cigars is healthier than eating a bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios with skim milk for breakfast. Not that the former is optimal, but compare it to the alternative that most people have for breakfast.

By doing so, he’s not raising his blood sugar or contributing to insulin resistance. Coffee is also associated with better health and a longer life, and inhibits iron absorption.

By having only coffee and whiskey for breakfast, he may be practicing a form of intermittent fasting. At least, he doesn’t seem to be eating around the clock like almost everyone else these days.

Moderate alcohol drinking is associated with less heart disease.

He might be practicing hormesis by smoking cigars. Tobacco use is associated with much less Parkinson’s disease. He’s said that he doesn’t inhale; while cigar smoking is associated with higher death rates, much of that appears to be due to lung cancer, which is caused by inhaling smoke. While I’m not recommending cigar smoking, it doesn’t seem to have harmed Mr. Overton.

He’s not overweight. There aren’t too many fat centenarians.

He doesn’t sleep too much

Too much sleep, over 8.5 hours, is associated with higher mortality.

He’s active

He still drives and owns guns. While someone in better health could be expected to stay more active, being active also helps one stay in better health.

He goes to church

Being socially active and especially attending church is associated with longer life. He has a girlfriend and a family and lots of friends, and is also active in veterans’ groups.

He avoids stress

Overton appears very easy-going. He’s said that after having bullets fly around him in the Pacific in World War II, nothing else could everbother him.

He said that he’s stayed out of trouble. That could mean avoiding bad people and dangerous things, thus avoiding getting hurt in a crime or an accident. If you want to live a long time, that’s a necessity.

Conclusion

Undoubtedly, Mr. Overton is blessed with a great genetic makeup. But some of his lifestyle could contribute to his long life.

PS: Check out my books, Dumping Iron, Muscle Up, and Stop the Clock.

Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms: Longevity Edition was originally published in Mission.org on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Insulin resistance, the condition in which a person becomes insensitive to the effects of insulin and has to produce more insulin to overcome that insensitivity, ultimately leads to diabetes if it goes on long enough. Insulin resistance is also related to cancer. In this article I’ll discuss why insulin resistance is a major risk for cancer, why this is important, and what you can do to dramatically decrease your cancer risk.

Association between insulin resistance and cancer

Insulin is a hormone, and one of its main functions is to allow cells to take up glucose from the blood to use for fuel. When more insulin than normal is required to do this, then a state of insulin resistance occurs. When insulin resistance gets to a point in which the body can’t keep glucose under control and blood sugar rises, that’s the disease of type 2 diabetes.

Both insulin resistance and diabetes are associated with many chronic diseases, as I discussed in my post on fasting insulin. Cancer is one of them.

Most people tend to think of cancer as something that strikes out of the blue and that there’s little they can do about it. (The exception being smoking and lung cancer.) The seemingly chance nature of cancer, as well as its often fatal outcome, are what make cancer so frightening to so many.

Cancer doesn’t strike by chance, though. Many factors that are under your control can radically decrease your risk of getting it. One of the most important is insulin resistance.

Prostate cancer

Men are often told that prostate cancer is almost unavoidable, that most men will have some degree of prostate cancer as they get old, even if it doesn’t become serious or kill them.

I doubt that’s true.

Men with insulin resistance have a far higher risk of prostate cancer. Men in the highest tertile (third) of insulin resistance were almost 3 times more likely to have prostate cancer than those in the lowest tertile.

Conversely, men with the highest insulin sensitivity had a 65% reduced risk of prostate cancer.

Waist-hip ratio as a measure of obesity adds to the risk. Men in the highest tertile of both insulin resistance and waist-hip ratio had more than 8 times the risk of prostate cancer.

Despite what you’ve heard, there’s no relation between testosterone and prostate cancer. In fact, testosterone replacement therapy (TRT) is associated with a decrease in the risk of prostate cancer of 40%. I speculate that it does this by improving body composition (ratio of muscle to fat) and thus improving insulin sensitivity.

Breast cancer

Breast cancer occupies a place in the psyche of women that may be hard to overestimate. Some women have feared it so much that they have had preemptive mastectomies — they’ve had their breasts chopped off so they won’t get breast cancer.

But as with prostate cancer, breast cancer is highly associated with insulin resistance. Women in the highest quintile (fifth) had nearly 3 times the risk of breast cancer than those in the lowest. That was independent of degree of body fat.

Other cancers

Insulin resistance and diabetes are associated with a higher risk of many other cancers. These include cancers of the stomach, colon, liver, pancreas, kidney, ovaries, and endometrium.

A recent study found that insulin resistance was associated with a 12 times greater risk of any cancer.

Metformin lowers cancer risk by lowering insulin

Metformin is a drug that lowers glucose and insulin and is the most common drug treatment for diabetics.

Metformin use is associated with large reductions in cancer relative to other diabetic drugs. New users of metformin have about a 40% decreased risk of cancer. New users have a lower risk in this study probably because they’re actually taking their metformin, whereas in other studies, results were based on any history of metformin use.

Glucose is fuel for cancer, so that’s one way metformin works.

Insulin promotes growth, and for that reason may promote cancer.

Metformin has become a hot topic in anti-aging circles, since it increases lifespan in mice. Human trials of metformin for life extension are under way.

From associations between higher insulin and increased cancer, and lower insulin (from metformin) and decreased cancer, it’s clear that insulin and insulin resistance raise the risk of cancer.

Berberine is an over-the-counter supplement that works very similarly to metformin.

Growth versus longevity

A big theme in aging is that of growth versus longevity. In general, anything that promotes growth also promotes aging, and anything that inhibits growth promotes life extension. Calorie restriction is a good example: it inhibits growth and extends lifespan. Exogenous human growth hormone promotes growth (obviously) and decreases lifespan.

Insulin also promotes growth. It causes energy storage of fat in fat cells, and is necessary for muscle growth too.

Unrestrained growth is a hallmark of cancer. Insulin and glucose promote that growth.

How to decrease the risk of cancer

There are actually lots of ways to decrease your risk of cancer, but for the moment, let’s confine the discussion to lowering insulin resistance to decrease cancer.

Low-carbohydrate diet

Low-carbohydrate diets cause insulin to decrease. Even when no weight is lost, insulin declines.

Ron Rosedale and Eric Westman studied patients put on a very low carbohydrate diet. Over the course of an average of 3 months, their insulin levels dropped about 40%, and glucose about 7%. This shows the importance of the insulin test, since the body can keep glucose within the normal range by increasing insulin, and a simple fasting blood glucose test does not detect this.

Fasting

In a comparison of fasting versus a carbohydrate-free diet, fasting lowered insulin response by 69%, while the carb-free diet lowered it by 49%. This led the researchers to conclude that carbohydrate restriction alone could account for more than 70% of the insulin response in fasting. Note that this was a 3-day fast, a long one.

Another study compared a 3.5-day fast to receiving all calories via lipid infusion. Insulin dropped in both conditions. These researchers concluded that absence of carbohydrate was responsible for all of the responses to fasting. Probably hyperbolic, in my estimate, but close.

Fasting decreases insulin and improves insulin sensitivity.

Strength training

Exercise improves insulin sensitivity. Quote from this study, “The most important site of peripheral insulin resistance is the skeletal muscle, and in this tissue there are several steps involved in insulin-mediated glucose uptake in which insulin resistance might occur.”

To improve insulin sensitivity the most, exercise all muscles. So, not (or just) aerobic exercise (cardio), but strength training. Lifting weights. Resistance training improves insulin sensitivity.

It does this by depleting muscles of glycogen and increasing glucose transporters in muscle tissue.

Conclusion

Insulin resistance is strongly associated with cancer. In fact, I know of no other association with cancer as strong, with the exception of cigarette smoking or perhaps very toxic chemicals such as heavy metals.

To decrease your risk of cancer, improve your insulin sensitivity via

• low-carbohydrate eating
• intermittent fasting
• lifting weights.

PS: Check out my books, Dumping Iron, Muscle Up, and Stop the Clock.

Insulin Sensitivity Decreases Cancer Risk was originally published in Better Humans on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I got into a small debate on Twitter with Brad Schoenfeld, a fitness expert who’s more than skeptical about low-carbohydrate eating. Despite the fact that low-carb diets outperform low-fat, calorie-restricted diets every time they’re put to the test, Schoenfeld thinks the evidence is lacking. Because diets are not matched for calories and protein. I thought that in this post, I’d show how lifting weights and low-carb make for excellent health markers.

Lifestyle Factors

I lift weights once every three days, doing a high-intensity program. I’ve been doing this for almost 7 years at this point, though I lifted weights when I was younger too.

I eat low-carb. A high-carb day for me is maybe 100 grams of carbs, and I do that maybe once a week. (Out at dinner, at a Mexican place; even though I order the chicken, lots of chips and salsa and tortillas come with it.) The rest of the time, I eat less than 50 grams of carbs. I take supplements, too. I also fast intermittently and dump iron.

I’m 61 years old, soon to be 62.

Fasting insulin and insulin resistance

My fasting insulin is 2.9. (Normal range: 2.6–24.9.) Basically, you can’t get much better than that. Fasting insulin is one of the most important biomarkers of health, as it shows a lack of insulin resistance.

Insulin resistance accelerates aging and disease like nobody’s business, and if there’s anything you want to avoid so that you don’t get the chronic diseases of aging, like cancer and heart disease, that’s it. Insulin resistance is commonly measured by HOMA-IR (Homeostatic Model Assessment of Insulin Resistance). The normal value for adults is <2.

My HOMA value: 0.8. Zero insulin resistance.

Triglyceride/HDL ratio

The ratio of triglycerides to HDL cholesterol is the most important item on a lipid panel. (See also the excellent article by George Henderson and Grant Schofield on the importance of the triglyceride/HDL ratio.)

My triglyceride/HDL ratio is 0.5. There are no normal ranges, but the ideal is considered <2.0, dicey 2.0 to 4.0, above 4.0, you need help; and above 6.0, prepare to die. (Just kidding — if it’s above 6.0, get to work.)

So, my triglyceride/HDL ratio is better than ideal.

My father had heart disease for many decades. Seeing this made me decide long ago that I never wanted it to happen to me. Looks like it won’t.

BMI and body fat

My BMI (body mass index) is just over 23. (Overweight is ≥25, obese ≥30.)

My body fat percent is about 12. That’s a guess, as I haven’t had it measured, and it could be higher. (If my guess isn’t good enough for you, oh well.) I’m not pro-bodybuilder-lean by a long shot, but I’m lean for a normal guy.

N=1

These stats are from just one person, so it doesn’t prove anything.

But, I eat delicious food, I never go hungry (other than a bit during fasting), and my biomarkers are better than perfect. All modesty aside, people compliment me on my appearance regularly.

So does it matter if the merits of a low-carbohydrate diet are not scientifically proven, with all the i’s dotted and t’s crossed? America is 80% overweight or obese; people normally lose weight easily on a low-carbohydrate diet, and we need a debate on its merits? Sheesh.

Granted, some portion of my excellent biomarkers are due to lifting weights. It’s not all diet.

But if people would just get off their backsides and lift some weights, while cutting the sugar and flour out of their diets, the obesity rate would drop like a stone. So would the rates of heart disease, diabetes, and cancer.

Conclusion

Eat a low-carbohydrate diet, lift weights, throw in some intermittent fasting if desired, and you’re golden. You won’t get heart disease, and you’ll look better than 95% of your peers.

Put more simply:

1. Cut out anything with flour and sugar, and
2. Lift weights.

The Simplest Health Plan: Cut Carbs, Lift Weights was originally published in Better Humans on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.