Ideas about Diet and Exercise

To answer most recent question, advising patients on lifestyle has nothing to do with my professional responsibilities. I specialize in diagnostics.

I just happened to also get interested in my own health recently so I started looking things up. A medical background helps yes, but I tell you, all of the stuff I learned about diet and exercise is not taught in med school. As a matter of fact, our medical teaching (calories in, calories out, avoid saturated fats, eat lots of whole grains etc... basically A) is contradictory.

It is also extremely out of date, embarrassingly. We learned all of this in the 1960s-1970s and started advising patients accordingly. Since then, virtually ALL chronic diseases have exploded - and this is NOT because we are able to diagnose things better. We haven't changed our advice since then. Those things we learned back then were based on complete garbage evidence that would be laughed at today. Yet, ironically, the medical profession now demands solid evidence to return to the ways before industrialization of our food supply. In other words, yes please screw us up without any need for evidence, but you better have solid evidence to fix us. What? You mean just using common sense and doing what we did before we screwed up isn't enough? Apparently not. And to wait for "solid good evidence", we will need 50 years of randomized controlled trials. I don't feel like waiting that long. I'm sure soon we will need evidence for the use of bike helmets and seatbelts.

To be clear... I am not bashing medicine entirely. People do live longer nowadays, but the quality of life while living is not better. It may be worse. Yes, we are great at unclogging the artery, but we are now just as good at getting that artery clogged in the first place.

I agree with one of Pollan's concepts which is to eat whole foods. That's a great start and a great way to keep garbage out of your systems.

However, I think a step up from Pollan's stuff is to also pay attention to what causes inflammation in the body, as inflammation is the common starting point for many chronic diseases (heart disease, autoimmune disease, and even cancer). Yes there is genetic predisposition, but environment really dictates whether these genes are expressed.

You asked why I recommend staying away from wheat, corn, soy and I should have also said SUGAR, is because they are now products of agribusiness and are virtually ubiquitous in our foods in large quantities. We told people to stay away from fats, and now they are replacing fats with all of this industrialized garbage. This is the grand central station of inflammation. Enter, chronic disease.

Calories in calories out is too deceiving. It doesn't discriminate on what foods are taken in, which is the whole point! I did a calorie count when I was 205 lb (about 2500 cal per day with lots exercise) and now when I am 160lb with a lot of muscle (close to 3800 calories per day with much less exercise). Lipid profile also improved tremendously. It's not how much you eat, it's entirely what you eat. Calories from a 100% grass fed steak or a stalk of broccoli do not equate to the same calories in sugar or wheat etc. The metabolic effects, inflammatory effects, glycemic effects of foods are what change your body and that's what your body sees. And these factors are what makes your body decide whether to use energy or store it. This can be overlooked if one just looks at the energy count in foods. It distracts us from what is actually harming us. And if you eat foods that are antiinflammatory, it is actually a struggle to put on weight no matter how much you eat!

As for Cardio, it's inflammatory by nature because it's usually a lengthy process. Plus it really isn't physiologic. We didn't really do much of that while we were evolving... so why would it be good for us now? We exerted ourselves in bursts of energy or we moved around slowly..... if we wasted our energy doing prolonged cardio we would be easy prey! I'm not super anti-cardio and on this forum I'll be crucified for this paragraph of course, but my cardiologist colleagues point me to evidence that marathoners and triatheles do have an increased risk of early cardiac death, but then they prescribe intense cardio to patients! I just feel that there should be some re-thinking around this, and there certainly has been. (Primal Blueprint, and especially Body by Science are great examples of books, the last of which is heavily evidence based)

Yes, focusing on calories in-calories out would be like bombing Australia when Finland is the one attacking you. (Selection of countries was geographically random for that example For the record I have friends from both and I'd love to travel to both.

Although this could result in temporary weight loss for some, it's not a way to focus on the origin of most health problems, including the ones that you may not be feeling the effects from YET.

The real question is - is the food you are eating working FOR you or AGAINST you? Both with respect to weight goals AND health.

Yeah I agree with respect to fitness goals, that's a tough one. But evidence is mounting on being able to increase cardiovascular endurance performance without having to go through the inflammation of chronic cardio training. Our bodies really aren't as simple and linear as we once thought.