Brian Johnson is my favorite teacher philosopher that is living that I've read/listened to. I've been following his newsletter and +1s since I met himBrian Johnson is my favorite teacher philosopher that is living that I've read/listened to. I've been following his newsletter and +1s since I met him in a cafe in Santa Monica in ~2007. I've consumed countless of his Notes (book summaries) and 101's on my journey, and have found his recapitulation of the masters, and just his *energy* around the topics to be infectious and immensely helpful. Brian is food for the spirit, and I can't wait to read this....more
Best book I've read on this topic. Really changes your thinking on all sorts of health topics. I've followed Peter Attia's podcast for a while, but thBest book I've read on this topic. Really changes your thinking on all sorts of health topics. I've followed Peter Attia's podcast for a while, but this is an excellent summary of all his best knowledge on health. He gave me a new goal and word - healthspan! Forget living a long time, the goal is to have a healthy body for as long as possible.
But the biggest takeaway from the book is exercise is the biggest lever on healthspan. I would have thought diet and exercise were close, but no, exercise is orders of magnitude the biggest lever. And this applies to reducing risk from all the "4 horseman" as he calls them (cancer, metabolic syndrome, alzheimers and brain degenerative diseases, and cardiovascular disease).
"Study after study has found that regular exercisers live as much as a decade longer than sedentary people. Not only do habitual runners and cyclists tend to live longer, but they stay in better health, with less morbidity from causes related to metabolic dysfunction."
One benefit of exercise is that it boosts your metabolism, which basically makes your body run healthier and be better at repairing itself. Interestingly, on the subject of taking supplements, Dr Attia was mostly negative on that with one exception, that he had a whole chapter about: rapamycin. I want to learn more about this drug.
"By cleansing our cells of damaged proteins and other cellular junk, autophagy allows cells to run more cleanly and efficiently and helps make them more resistant to stress. But as we get older, autophagy declines. Impaired autophagy is thought to be an important driver of numerous aging-related phenotypes and ailments, such as neurodegeneration and osteoarthritis. Thus, I find it fascinating that this very important cellular mechanism can be triggered by certain kinds of interventions, such as a temporary reduction in nutrients (as when we are exercising or fasting)—and the drug rapamycin."
Strength is also super important, as muscle mass and bone density decay significantly after age 50, and it's very hard if not impossible to gain back later. Dr Attia recommends that whatever age you are (20s to 80s) it's best to build strength. His goal for his patients is to be in the top 5th percentile of strength for their age. Strength is another top predictor of healthspan - in a way it even defines it as if you are strong you can still hike/bike/surf/etc, and if you can't do the things you love you will lose your zest for life.
"One of the prime hallmarks of aging is that our physical capacity erodes. Our cardiorespiratory fitness declines for various reasons that begin with lower cardiac output, primarily due to reduced maximum heart rate. We lose strength and muscle mass with each passing decade, our bones grow fragile and our joints stiffen, and our balance falters, a fact that many men and women discover the hard way, by falling off a ladder or while stepping off a curb."
To improve strength, Dr Attia does and recommends consistent weight training, with a lot of focus on stability, as the most important thing is to be strong in a way that avoids injury as we do other things. He also does things like rucking, which sounds interesting and I may have to get into - the thesis here is our ancestors did a lot of carrying of heavy things, and it's really good for us therefore, but we don't do it as much anymore. Goal: be able to carry half your body weight in each hand for 1 minute.
In my half-ironman training in the past few years I've done a lot of zone 2 bike rides, and I continue to do them. But I didn't realize they were actually really good for you outside of building base cycling form. Dr Attia does multiple zone 2 workouts per week. I love this, because it gives me permission to just go a long slow bike ride and know that is improving my fitness across the board. And of course, I use those to listen to audio books and podcasts - win/win!
"As fundamental as zone 2 training is for professional cyclists, however, San Millán believes that it’s even more important for nonathletes, for two reasons. First, it builds a base of endurance for anything else you do in life, whether that is riding your bike in a one-hundred-mile century ride or playing with your kids or grandkids. The other reason is that he believes it plays a crucial role in preventing chronic disease by improving the health and efficiency of your mitochondria"
The biggest correlated predictor of longevity number that we have is VO2 max. Dr Attia says his goal is to get to the top 2 percentile of VO2 max for his age. I love this, and this is my new goal in life. My Garmin watch says I'm 90th percentile, so I have more to climb!
"It turns out that peak aerobic cardiorespiratory fitness, measured in terms of VO2 max, is perhaps the single most powerful marker for longevity."
Good tip: "Where HIIT intervals are very short, typically measured in seconds, VO2 max intervals are a bit longer, ranging from three to eight minutes—and a notch less intense." And: "The tried-and-true formula for these intervals is to go four minutes at the maximum pace you can sustain for this amount of time—not an all-out sprint, but still a very hard effort. Then ride or jog four minutes easy, which should be enough time for your heart rate to come back down to below about one hundred beats per minute. Repeat this four to six times and cool down."
Alcohol is one of my weaknesses as I love a nice bottle of wine with a nice dinner. And I've listened to podcasts on the topic and read a book about it: Drink. My French teacher (and most French in general) swear that a small amount of wine is good for you, but the science is clear - alcohol is a net negative even in small amounts. But small amounts is much better for you than large amounts, and so if you are going to drink, Dr Attia recommends:
"I strongly urge my patients to limit alcohol to fewer than seven servings per week, and ideally no more than two on any given day, and I manage to do a pretty good job adhering to this rule myself."
Dr Attia highly recommends trying a GCM, which I haven't done yet but am very interested in.
One thing I didn't know is you can't overeat protein - if you do so your body just excretes it. However if you overeat carbs or fats your body has to store those, and this is the major cause of weight gain. His chapter on how to measure your blood results and eat healthier was nothing new but a good overview.
"Putting all these changes into practice typically means eating more olive oil and avocados and nuts, cutting back on (but not necessarily eliminating) things like butter and lard, and reducing the omega-6-rich corn, soybean, and sunflower oils—while also looking for ways to increase high-omega-3 marine PUFAs from sources such as salmon and anchovies."
I have been a fan of occasionally doing 8/16 fasting as a tool for losing weight or if I just had a big late dinner the night before. But as a regular tool, despite the popularity of fasting in the last few years, Dr Attia is not a big fan, as it causes too much muscular decay. I still think its a useful occasional tool, but not a regular habit to adopt.
"As a result of this and other research, I have become convinced that frequent, prolonged fasting may be neither necessary nor wise for most patients. The cost, in terms of lost lean mass (muscle) and reduced activity levels, simply does not justify whatever benefits it may bring. My rule of thumb for any eating pattern, in fact, is that you must eat enough to maintain lean mass (muscle) and long-term activity patterns."
Dr Attia's last chapter was on mental health, where he was quite vulnerable and shared his own issues with abuse and depression, which led to a lot of anger. I think a lot of successful people are driven by trying to prove something in this way. Was a really good reminder that we all are probably not spending enough time paying attention to our mental health - it's as important as exercising, eating well, and sleeping well. So those are the big 4!
Overall, great overview and one I may be re-reading parts of it. I was already applying a lot of this, some of it I was aware of but not applying so great reminder. And I learned some new things too. But mostly and overall, it's a strong case for living healthy now. If we are healthy now, we can find all kinds of things in the future to look forward to doing.
"“I think people get old when they stop thinking about the future,” Ric told me. “If you want to find someone’s true age, listen to them. If they talk about the past and they talk about all the things that happened that they did, they’ve gotten old. If they think about their dreams, their aspirations, what they’re still looking forward to—they’re young.” Here’s to staying young, even as we grow older." ...more
Overall, very useful and helpful book that made me think harder about my habits around alcohol. My major takeaways that I'm enacting:
1. Two days in aOverall, very useful and helpful book that made me think harder about my habits around alcohol. My major takeaways that I'm enacting:
1. Two days in a row of drinking is extremely bad for you as your body doesn't have time to recover and you don't sleep well, it's a downward spiral. Avoid this if at all possible, and go light the second day if you decide to drink. 2. Binge drinking, or getting "wasted" is very bad for you, much better to limit how much you do this. 3. Occasional breaks from alcohol of 2-4 are very, very good for you as they establish the habit of not drinking, and tend to lower your drinking after you do drink again. It can take a few weeks to remove all effects of alcohol from your system and let your liver fully recover. 4. Have a glass of water for every glass of alcohol, and a big one before bed.
Other interesting tidbits:
Alcohol is a huge dopamine stimulant, which is in part why it feels so good, and why we might crave it when stressed.
I didn't realize that in the old days, beer and wine had much less alcohol in them than they do today (3-4% vs 5-8% today for beer). In middle ages I think it was even less, which is why people could drink it so often.
Drinking while driving is a huge cause of death. In the US we have a .08% limit, which is actually not even that safe. Many countries in Europe have .05%, and many in Scandinavia have .02% (basically sober).
A good way to drink consciously is to count your drinks and plan them for the week. If you know you will be drinking 2 nights in a given week, and then plan to have no more than 4 drinks on each of those nights, you are more likely to not exceed/overdrink.
Don't drink to drown your sorrows. I love this quote: "I drank to drown my sorrows, but the damned things learned how to swim. Frida Kahlo"...more
Fascinating book about the limits of human endurance, well researched and backed by science. Worth reading, but if your goal is to learn how to becomeFascinating book about the limits of human endurance, well researched and backed by science. Worth reading, but if your goal is to learn how to become a faster athlete, it ambles a lot and doesn't really focus on that question as much. That said, lots of interesting tidbits.
First, some basics - oxygen in the bloodstream fuels us up to a point, and with increased oxygen we get increased performance. That is only up to a point, of course, which is called your VO2max - as you approach that point you start to burn carbohydrates, which produce lactic acid, fatigue your muscles, and make you slow down or stop.
Disappointingly to me, the book didn't go as much into how to improve your endurance or train up to elite levels. With one exception - it focused a lot on mental stamina, which the author seemed obsessed by. It gave a lot of interesting examples of people who have done remarkable things by pushing boundaries (a guy lifing a car off a cyclist trapped underneath, a woman who drowned saving her son in dangerous surf by treading water for hours). And to be fair, it is an interesting question of how the mind regulates us and how you can learn to push those limits. Because we all rate limit ourselves - if you go out for a 5 mile run at the 4 mile mark you start to feel it because you know you are almost there - versus if you go out for a 10 mile run, at mile 4 you feel fine - because your brain regulates it. So if it's all in your head, can you improve mental endurance to affect that? The answer is it sounds like you can, but it's a nascent field.
Drugs can also help endurance - a placebo pill will boost performance by several percentage points, as will caffeine, Tylenol, or even crystal meth (which puts a whole new lens on the Blitzkrieg). Swishing gatorade or anything with carbs in your mouth and spitting it out also improves performance by a few points, which speaks to mental power.
Ice baths are something that many people I know and have read about swear by - but apparently the science says they are neutral - IE have no measurable impact on performance. (Curious if there are other takes on this?).
Your body starts to run out of fuel about about an hour of intense exercise, so even in a half marathon it's good to fuel - you can only absorb about 250 calories an hour though. Sports drinks like gatorade or gels.
But the best advice that I at least gleaned as a combo of improving mental belief and pushing your limits there:
A good capture of French food culture by a Canadian author who moved to France for a year and was forced to learn the hard way. Some of her learnings A good capture of French food culture by a Canadian author who moved to France for a year and was forced to learn the hard way. Some of her learnings didn't apply to me - eg I was shocked at how much snacking she had her kids doing in Vancouver - like 4-5 snacks per day - crazy! But some of her tips were very helpful, and are confirmed by my experiences in France so far (I've been here for 4 months).
There is a lot here, and I encourage people to check out my notes. But my top takeaways are:
1. A kid has to try a new food ~10 times before they will start to like it. So the goal is getting them to try a taste of new foods. To this end, don't serve the kids different food than adults get - don't cook them a special meal - they need to learn to eat what adults eat and to try everything. This is probably the biggest takeaway of the book (and is its title) - that you can get kids to eat everything by getting them to try new foods. You can also help this process be easier by introducing the new foods in easy to consume formats designed for this (eg leek soup to get used to leeks).
2. The French prioritize healthy eating. Buying food in a French market is a pleasure, whereas going to a grocery store in the US is a chore. In France you can ask vendors where stuff comes from and what is best and they always have an answer, that sometimes leads you to new discoveries. In the US, you can ask the teenager at the grocery store those questions, but you won't get the same experience. The government has strict rules around food that ensures this, and that is something that I wish the US could enact, but it won't for reasons that I won't go into.
3. The French have a culture of eating slowly and enjoying their food. Lunches and dinners are at the table, and eaten together, with plenty of time for conversation. They also make sure to have plenty of variety at the table. This makes food more enjoyable and is healthier for digestion. It's also very health for families! The fact that many stores in France are closed from noon to 2 or 3pm is super annoying, but this is part of the culture of food and family. This is at odds with the culture of fast food and multi-tasking while eating that we have in the US. In French schools, the cantine (dining hall) the kids are served food by teachers, who make sure the kids get some of everything, and educate the kids about what everything is - and there is only one menu!
4. The French only have 4 meals a day, and do not snack at all outside these. Breakfast (which is small and literally called petit dejeune or "small lunch"), lunch (often the largest meal of the day), goûter (afternoon snack at 3 or 4pm), and dinner. So there is a snack, but it's planned, and importantly, it's also done with fresh, health foods, not processed foods. As I learned in The Obesity Code, snacking and particular midnight snacking are particularly bad for you. A particularly important bit is to not allow snacking before a meal, because kids certainly won't eat something new if they aren't hungry. Also, water is a food group!
5. To enjoy food, enjoy local food. This means buying and cooking local products, something the French call Terrior. So the veggies and meats you find in France in a given season won't be the same as at home, but the key is to search out and find those fresh, local products and enjoy them. That is a the key to enjoying where you live, great food, and is a great bonding activity with family and friends.
I highly recommend Foundation Training to every athlete and every person who wants to feel stronger. But also and especially to anyone dealing with baI highly recommend Foundation Training to every athlete and every person who wants to feel stronger. But also and especially to anyone dealing with back pain.
I threw my back out badly in April (herniated disk), and in June I still couldn't sit in a chair for more than 20min. I was doing some PT and pilates strengthening stuff that was definitely helping - the McKenzie method took my back from totally in pain to maybe 70% recovered. But when I started this, my recovery accelerated 3x, and 2-3 months later, I was pretty much fully recovered! I now intend to make these exercise part of my ongoing routine, because I think they give you a strong "foundation" (it's well named!) to be strong for other activities. It's very understandable why Kelly Slater, Derek Fisher, and many other top tier athletes have endorsed it. My wife, who was almost a professional ballerina and also knows pilates, says many of the techniques in here are similar to ballet and pilates, so I don't think they are necessarily new, but have been nicely packaged.
I mostly used the DVD set and did the exercises there, but I found the first few chapters of the book to be useful for understanding some of the science of it. These quotes give you the high level:
I threw my back out and had a coworker (Thanks Libby) and my new PT recommend this same book on the same day. I read it, and 2 days later, I am on theI threw my back out and had a coworker (Thanks Libby) and my new PT recommend this same book on the same day. I read it, and 2 days later, I am on the right path! Assuming that trend continues, this book is magic!
It basically says that many of us who work sitting down all day have bad posture and lose our lordosis (the curvature of the lower back). If this happens it puts strain on your disks while can easily lead to a strain and thus throwing out your back. The fix is simple - to do stretches that push the back to have lordosis again.
The informational chapters with the basics on Salt, Fat, Acid, and Heat are highly worth it to get a good base. I've made a bunch of the recipes this The informational chapters with the basics on Salt, Fat, Acid, and Heat are highly worth it to get a good base. I've made a bunch of the recipes this year too - have really enjoyed this cookbook....more
The best book about how to eat healthy and the reasoning behind it that I've yet read. Well backed with science and uses studies to make all his pointThe best book about how to eat healthy and the reasoning behind it that I've yet read. Well backed with science and uses studies to make all his points. Highly recommended for everyone (the title is misleading, its not just for obese people).
The main theory of the book is that the root cause of obesity and weight gain is a complex hormonal imbalance, that stems from high blood insulin levels. High insulin levels are responsible for obesity, and to a smaller degree, so can high cortisol levels (being overly stressed can lead to weight gain). High insulin levels are a direct result of poor diet, and are 95% of the cause of obesity. Exercise is 5% of it (I would have said it was 70/30, so this was interesting). The foods that contribute to weight gain are largely a result of too much sugar and too much refined carbohydrates. Obesity can also be "genetic" and passed to kids in the sense that if a mother has high insulin levels it will be passed to the child.
A fascinating part of the book was that while many of us would intuitively say sugar and processed carbs are the culprit, the prevailing wisdom by all official sources is different - eg look at what the NHS website says: "Obesity is generally caused by eating too much and moving too little.". This theory of calories in minus calories out, has prevailed for 50+ years, and the book makes a good case for it being wrong. The kind of calories make all the difference. To prove this, the book goes into all the data it could find about weight loss studies done, and found that generally, diets don't work. Shocker, I know, because again intuitively we all know that - its easy to go on a diet and lose weight, but then it always comes back. Why is this?
Basically, our bodies are like thermostats in our houses - they are set to a certain weight, and our bodies do their darnedest to keep our weight there. To change our weight, we have to change our "body set weight" first. To do that, we have to lower our insulin levels, by eating less things that make them spike.
This book was recommended to me by my doctor, as I did some bloodwork which said I high slightly high cholesterol and should lose 10 pounds. He recommended I start doing 8/16 fasting, and when I asked for reading material to learn about it, he recommended this book. I can report after 2 months, it really works. I don't miss breakfast - I just have coffee on many mornings, and am fine - and lost the 10 pounds! The reason fasting works is well described in the book, and its a huge new tool in my arsenal. Basically, our bodies need time to process insulin in our bodies, and if we don't get it, it leads to continuous elevated insulin levels, which leads to weight gain. So by not eating for 12 hours a day (overnight), or 16 hours (overnight plus skip breakfast), you can lower your insulin levels. This is a neat trick as now I know if I have a huge dinner, its not necessary to have breakfast. It's also helpful as snacking, in particular late night snacking, is one of the worst things for you. In fact:
Fasting may sound like a terrible hungry hangover, but it's actually very natural and a part of our human history. It's also a very effective weight loss tool:
The reason that most of us don't know how to eat well? Because nobody really knows the truth, because the food industry has spent money to conceal it, being subsidized by the government all along. The book Salt Sugar Fat goes into more depth on this topic, but with such big dollars at stake you couldn't exactly declare that everything that Nestle or Proctor & Gamble makes is bad for you (it is). Their first scapegoat was fats, and thus was born several decades of focus on "low fat foods" - however, there are no studies that actually find a correlation between low fat diets and lower cholesterol and thus reduced heart disease. It just didn't exist - the whole "low fat" diet thing failed. Now there is another scapegoat:
Soda and all sugary drinks deserve a large portion of the blame. The data of the rise of soda and obesity are strongly correlated, and happened over the same years. If you are still drinking soda or any drink other than water or sparkling water, stop!
But then a good thing happened, and in the 21st century in the US we started to recognize the evils of soda and drink less. Profits for Coca Cola fell. So then:
So far I've only talked about avoid sugar and processed carbohydrates generally - but the book does a great job of better explaining why processed carbohydrates are so bad. Basically, the processing removes all the "good stuff" they come with that offset the effects of the carbs.
The author, Matthew Walker, makes a compelling case for sleep that frankly even after having read many articles about the importance of sleep, and eveThe author, Matthew Walker, makes a compelling case for sleep that frankly even after having read many articles about the importance of sleep, and even watching his TED talk, changed my perspective. It has convinced me that I have likely been under-slept much of the past 10 years (3 kids and a busy job will make it hard), and that has been a negative contributor to my health and well being. Specifically, I have always been of the belief that I am a person who can subsist on 6-7 hours of sleep, but this book makes me believe I need to be getting 8, and that the difference is material to both my mental and physical health.
But more so, it warns of a global sleep epidemic. And this really rings true. Sleep is something we spend (if we are doing it right), a third of our lives doing, and which should be put up there with eating well and exercising. And yet how often have you heard recommendations for eating well and exercising that don't also include a recommendation to sleep enough? The book makes a strong case that we are vastly under educating people about the benefits of sleep. This sentence for instance, both rings true and is one of the scariest in the book:
If this isn't an epidemic, what is? Like me, many of us have a notion that we should work hard during the week and "catch up" later or (pre-kids) on the weekend. Interestingly, this notion is false - we can never catch up, the damage has been done.
It's not just our culture of working too hard and looking at screens too much, there are a few specific cultural things the book rants against. First (and in my opinion, justified) is a rant against schools that have start times that are too early - teenagers in particular still have forming brains and need their sleep. Second and most ironic is our medical schools culture of 24 or 48 hour shifts - the medical community should know better, and if they don't, it's no wonder the rest of us don't take it seriously enough.
So why do we sleep? One big reason is that it literally stores your memories from the day - it moves them from short term to long term storage, and if you don't get good sleep, you just lose the memories! I shudder to think of how many classes I crammed for during college on no sleep and then promptly forgot it all :(. The phrase "let me sleep on it" exists in every culture because it works - our brains will be better on a problem the following day, because the information has been moved to long term storage, and intermingled with our neural net of everything else in our brains.
One fascinating insight was the studies that showed that the last 2 hours of sleep (from hour 6 to 8) were some of the most key hours for deep NREM sleep, which does your memory storage. When you short those by only getting 6 hours, it matters a lot!
The bits about physical performance for athletes was solidly backed and fascinating. I'd heard that "Federer gets 9-10 hours" and the such for similar top performers, but this backed it up - you really do perform 30-50% better with more sleep, AND recover 30-50% better with more sleep the next night.
The book had several convincing chapters about the improved health risks of sleeping more. It reduces chances of cancer and probably about everything else, since sleep is what helps your body repair itself. These bits were scary to read, and intended to be so. His "convincer", that he opened his TED Talk with, is that men who are sleep deprived have 30% reduced sperm count, lower testosterone, and smaller testicles.
While the book was great at the science of what we know about sleep, it didn't go enough into what is known about how to improve sleep. But it did have good high level tips:
I did want more tips on beating jet lag, which the book didn't really go into, other than to say it will take 1 day to adjust 1 hour, so it takes a week to adjust to a move from the US to EU (which I knew).
I bought an Oura ring after reading this book, which gives great data and graphs about my sleep, but I am still struggling to get high Oura scores. So I'm still looking for what works for me. But now I'm committed to striving for 8 hours a night instead of 7, which has already made a big difference!...more
I decided to give up eating processed sugar for the month of January, and so reading a book with this title seemed like it would help me adhere. And nI decided to give up eating processed sugar for the month of January, and so reading a book with this title seemed like it would help me adhere. And not only did it succeed in that goal, but I think it put a permanent, deep scare in me about sugar. The book basically argues that sugar is the root cause of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and even a lot of cancer.
What is interesting is while all of us know that sugar is not good for us, the only thing that people officially blame on overconsumption of it is tooth decay. Obesity is highly correlated with diabetes, heart disease, and a number of other bad things. If you Google for the cause of obesity, you see statements like “Obesity is generally caused by eating too much and moving too little. If you consume high amounts of energy, particularly fat and sugars, but don't burn off the energy through exercise and physical activity, much of the surplus energy will be stored by the body as fat.” This book makes the argument that a calorie is not a calorie, that sugar is actually toxic, but unlike other toxins it takes decades of overconsumption to show up - which has made it hard to prove.
The statistics are fascinating. Fifty years ago, one in eight American adults was obese; today the number is greater than one in three. Diabetes has gone from 1 in 2,000-3,000 to 1 in 7-8, which is an astounding increase. The book listed numerous examples of native populations that suffered from a similar diabetes epidemic after adopting the “western diets and lifestyle”. What is it about western lifestyle that has done this? The culprit is almost certainly something in the diet, and linked to processed foods - and after reading this book, it seems very logical that sugar is either the root or one of the main root causes.
“By the late 1970s, though, sugar had mostly vanished from the discussion. Dietary fat had been implicated as a cause of heart disease. Nutritionists and public-health authorities responded by rejecting the idea that sugar could be responsible for the diseases that associated with heart disease, which included both obesity and diabetes.”
The book gives a fascinating history of how nutritionists and the government have viewed sugar as largely harmless. This included an impressive amount of lobbying from the sugar industry to vindicate themselves. Mind-blowingly, the sugar industry back in the 50’s actually advertised sugar as a great, healthy way to get calories. Sugar has never, and largely is still not thought of as a root cause of obesity - the narrative is still more about fats and “lifestyle” (i.e. lack of exercise).
“To the sugar industry, it has been the gift that keeps on giving, the ultimate defense against all arguments and evidence that sugar is uniquely toxic. This is the idea that we get obese or overweight because we take in more calories than we expend or excrete. By this thinking, researchers and public-health authorities think of obesity as a disorder of “energy balance,” a concept that has become so ingrained in conventional thinking, so widespread, that arguments to the contrary have typically been treated as quackery, if not a willful disavowal of the laws of physics.”
“Fat” is often the culprit named for people getting fat (even the word is the same!), and thus was born a processed food industry that touts “low-fat” items (which are then rich in sugar+salt to offset the bad taste). But looking at populations that eat high fat content but low sugar, shows lower rates of obesity and heart disease. For instance, the French.
“When researchers realized that the French had relatively low rates of heart disease despite a diet that was rich in saturated fats, they wrote it off as an inexplicable “paradox,” and ignored the fact that the French traditionally consumed far less sugar than did populations— the Americans and British, most notably— in which coronary disease seemed to be a scourge. At the end of the eighteenth century, French per capita sugar consumption was less than a fifth of what it was in England. At the end of the nineteenth century, even after the beet-sugar revolution, France was still lagging far behind both the British and the Americans— thirty-three pounds for the French compared with eighty-eight for the English and sixty-six for Americans.”
Interestingly, when we say “sugar” we can actually be referring to a number of things: fructose, glucose, or sucrose. Glucose is used to refer to blood sugar levels in blood, and also comes from eating carb rich foods like bread or potatoes. Sucrose is table sugar, which actually made of part fructose. Fructose is the scary one because “it is very different from other sugars because it has a different metabolic pathway and is not the preferred energy source for muscles or the brain.”. Fructose is found in fruit but as such low levels that it isn’t harmful, plus its offset by rich fibers. But high fructose corn syrup? Avoid at all costs.
The logic is basically: IF excess sugar (fructose notably) leads to insulin resistance, THEN we can say with confidence that it is likely a root cause of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and even cancer, as it’s been proven to be correlated with all those things. High fat diets - particularly the wrong sorts of fats - are also involved if eaten in excess. The logic seems solid - and yet even searching “what causes obesity” you don’t see sugar named as a key cause. I’d be very curious to learn from nutritionists what the think of this logic.
“Is it that we’re all simply eating too much and exercising too little, which is the one simple answer that the nutritional establishment will embrace in the face of so much evidence to the contrary? Another simple answer, and a more likely one, is sugar.”...more
Very interesting and scientific book, highly recommended especially for parents. The book goes into the age old nature vs nuture question for what makVery interesting and scientific book, highly recommended especially for parents. The book goes into the age old nature vs nuture question for what makes a successful athlete. And basically finds that both are required. Wsome people are more athletic than others for their given sport, and some people "respond" better to training. You need to both have the right body type AND be a high responder to reach elite - but you still have to train!
You also have to train enough to be able to be able to read the game at a glance. This requires lots of hours spent, whether its basketball or chess or any sport.
The book lays into the 10,000 hour theory a bit, made popular by Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers, saying that the time spent alone is not enough. A person also has to have some sort of genetic advantage, AND have the passion and focus to make those hours of practice as useful as possible. For instance, if I practice tennis with a mediocre player vs if I practice with Roger Federer or a top tier player, I'm going to progress at very different rates on those hours. So it's not just hours spent, there is a quality metric attached to it.
A fascinating in-depth and well researched look at the processed food industry. I recommend this for anyone who buys food at a grocery or convenience A fascinating in-depth and well researched look at the processed food industry. I recommend this for anyone who buys food at a grocery or convenience store (aka everyone). I read this book hoping to learn more about processed foods and how to avoid them, and I definitely got what I was looking for. Before reading this I was trying to avoid processed foods, and this book has helped increase that resolve, as well as educated me more on how to do it. It is absolutely amazing and frightening how many processed foods - some of which I remember fondly like Capri Sun - have enough salt/sugar/fat to easily account for a quarter or half of your daily recommended limit. This makes it super easy to go way over, and the result is unhealthy, fat Americans.
One of the more powerful things of this book was that Moss went deep into the food industry to really understand the dynamics at play. He didn't just demonize them for making the US one of the fattest countries in the world. He interviewed dozens of insiders - current and retired, to get their perspectives.
And the bottom line is scary. The food industry has zero incentive to produce healthier food. Because the high calorie food that they make that is stuffed with salt, sugar, and fat sells really well. It's tasty and convenient and cheap, and people buy whats tasty, and have no time or money to make or buy healthier options. And when the industry has tried to reduce the salt, sugar or fat, every time they find that it doesn't sell as well. Sure they have made some incremental improvements here and there, but by and large, the grocery store is a scary place if you don't want to vastly exceed your daily caloric intake.
It seems clear to me that things will never get better without government intervention - something that Moss also concludes in the book. Trying to understand a food label is impossible for most people, as (1) you have to know by heart the daily recommended values for calories, salt, sugar, and fat, and (2) you have to do math to figure out how many servings you are eating. Doing both of these just won't happen for 99% of the population, and thus we are where we are. We cannot rely on the food industry to make healthier products - we have make them do so by choosing with our wallets.
In my opinion, the FDA or someone in the government needs to get a good designer to fix food labels and get them to a state where any American can easily look at them and go "oh my gosh this [can of pasta sauce] will account for [a quarter] of my daily recommended [caloric/protein/fat/sugar] intake if I eat it". Maybe some startup can combine a phone camera and some image recognition to do this. The right organization to drive this is the FDA, but they are not acting.
So why doesn't the government act to prevent the obesity epidemic (and yes, that word is appropriate)? Moss spends a bit of time in the book examining this question, interviewing people at the FDA and the Dept of Agriculture. His conclusion is that they aren't incentivized or enabled to act. The food industry is well capitalized and has - for some inescapable reason to me - been able to fight every report of how bad their products are. Regulation is a tricky subject in America, but it seems that even the role of getting information to Americans about how to protect their health is completely broken.
One of the more interesting things I learned from the book is how sophisticated the food industry is in marketing their products. Their segmentation is impressive, and they find the right products, messages and mediums for each segment. They have learned to be on top of trends and perform slight of hand tricks with ease. For instance Americans initially loved their breakfasted cereals when marketed using the word "sugar". When people finally caught on that many of these were 50-70% sugar (!!!) the industry changed their marketing to promote other aspects, and removed the word sugar. Sugar Frosted Flakes became Frosted Flakes. Same thing for "low salt" or "low fat" or "includes some vitamin or nutrient" trends.
This is good to know if you are in the grocery store, as they still use these tricks. If a product is "low sugar", it's probably high in fat and/or salt, and same for "low fat" or "low salt". Or they will pick a nutrient or vitamin and promote that to hide the high amounts of salt, sugar & fat - for instance Tang was marketed as having lots of Vitamin-C (but was and is really bad for you).
One of the biggest trends that led to processed food in the past 40 years is summed up by the word "convenience". That's been a big part of the food industries marketing tactics, and it's worked. Life has become increasingly busy and complex, and we don't have time to go to work *and* shop for and cook a healthy meal. An aspect of this that I hadn't thought about is the rise of dual-working families - we have gone from 50% of women in the workforce in 1970 to 80% today. Families simply don't have time when both parents work to spend hours cooking when they get home. Thus, "convenience", or foods that are easy to buy and make, have risen drastically in that timeframe.
Emotionally, I could see how this marketing worked on me as a kid. Hearing about products that I used to eat and remembered fondly was kind of sad. Capri Sun, lunchables, hot pockets are just a few such examples mentioned in the book, none of which is particularly good for you.
The most damning evidence Moss finds is that none of the executives or insiders he talked to eat their own dogfood. In fact, they all have diets that explicitly prohibit it. I think that's very telling.
Overall, I think book will open your eyes to the "battlefield" for space and attention that goes on in the grocery store, and to pay more attention to the labels. That's a big educational process, but one which everyone needs to learn how to do. We need to force the food industry to stop producing foods that are unhealthy by stopping buying them....more
Fascinating tales of super runners, and some of the science of why some humans can do 100 mile running races, and even how we evolved from being a runFascinating tales of super runners, and some of the science of why some humans can do 100 mile running races, and even how we evolved from being a running race.
The book starts with an investigation of why "Up to eight out of every ten runners are hurt every year.", a notion that stands at odds with the fact that some people can run, and even compete in, races that are 26, 50, 100, and even 150 miles long. In particular, there is a race of people in Mexico, the Tarahumara who regularly do runs of those distances, over crazy hard terrain and in crazy hot temperatures. Clearly, these people have figured out how to run without injuring themselves, and how to do it while having FUN! Both of those are key.
I'd heard about and read a little about proper running form being to not heel strike, but this put that into a new light. Aside from the Tarahumara running crazy distances in rubber sandals, there was this quote from legendary Stanford running coach Vin Lananna:
Between that and the publication of this book, thus began the explosion of barefoot shoes (side note: anyone know how those things are selling these days?). Basically barefoot training forces your feet to land more gently, is how we evolved to run, and mucking with that by putting on big cushioned running shoes is why so many runners get injured. Thanks, Nike. Certainly worth trying.
The Running Theory of Evolution was interesting too - what if humans became upright because we had evolved into the ultimate distance running machines, using that for millennia to hunt before we invented tools like the bow and arrow. It is possible to hunt a deer by running it down, but it takes ~4-6 hours - basically, marathon distance - hmmm... Also interesting is that all running animals (cheetah, dogs, horses, etc) can only take one breathe per stride because of the way their lungs work - we humans are the only ones who can take multiple.
So basically, we evolved into a running species and it's in our genes. Not all of us love it anymore because... well we don't need to run to survive anymore. But if you can dig in and discover how to do it properly, you might unlock a love of something that our bodies possibly actually ARE designed to do, despite a lot opinions to the contrary.
Some distance runners and endurance athletes do what they do because they are trying to punish some demon inside themselves. But I think that running for the love of it is really the best message this book contains. That's why the Tarahumara have smiles on their faces as they run - something I'm going to keep in mind.
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