Ultrarunners have more allergies, asthma, knee pain & stress fractures

"One of the first large-scale studies of ultrarunners -- those superhumans who race distances longer than the standard 26.2-mile marathon -- shows that these runners are more likely to suffer from more allergies and asthma."

"They also report more knee pain and stress fractures, but when you're running 50 miles at a time, that seems about right."

Source: Ultrarunners aren't always ultrahealthy

Related Post: Run 2,800 miles in 64 days - loose muscle, fat, and brain!

Is aerobic fitness or BMI the better predictor of academic performance?

Image: Mosborne01Is a child’s weight or their aerobic fitness the better predictor of academic performance? Researchers of the Partnership for Healthy Lincoln in Nebraska studied this question in fourth- to eighth-grade students and published their findings in the August 2013 Journal of Pediatrics.

“Aerobic fitness was defined by entering the healthy fitness zone of Fitnessgram's Progressive Aerobic Cardiovascular Endurance Run, which has been shown to correlate highly with maximum oxygen consumption.” 

Academic performance was assessed in relation to passing the Nebraska State Accountability math and reading tests. Adjustments were made for factors such as age, gender, body mass index (BMI), and free/reduced lunch status.

“After adjustment, aerobically fit students had greater odds of passing the NeSA math and reading tests compared with aerobically unfit students.”

The researchers concluded:

“Aerobic fitness was a significant predictor of academic performance; weight status was not. Although decreasing BMI for an overweight or obese child undoubtedly improves overall health, results indicated all students benefit academically from being aerobically fit regardless of weight or free/reduced lunch status. Therefore, to improve academic performance, school systems should focus on the aerobic fitness of every student.”

Source: Evidence that aerobic fitness is more salient than weight status in predicting standardized math and reading outcomes in fourth- through eighth-grade students.

Here's one approach to Paleo fitness. Enough said.

PubMed: Aerobic fitness improves academic performance in 4th to 8th grade students

"Aerobic fitness was a significant predictor of academic performance; weight status was not. Although decreasing BMI for an overweight or obese child undoubtedly improves overall health, results indicated all students benefit academically from being aerobically fit regardless of weight or free/reduced lunch status. Therefore, to improve academic performance, school systems should focus on the aerobic fitness of every student."

Evidence that aerobic fitness is more salient than weight status in predicting standardized math and reading outcomes in fourth- through eighth-grade students.

How healthy is your heart?

People were considered to have optimal heart health if they met the following criteria: They did not have high blood pressure, high cholesterol or diabetes; they were not overweight, underweight or obese; they did not smoke; they did at least 150 minutes of moderate physical activity or 75 minutes of vigorous physical activity a week; and they ate five or more servings of fruits and vegetables a day.

Few Americans Have 'Healthy' Hearts
MyHealthNewsDaily

Mark Sisson's training deload week

A deload week is a “take it easy” week. It’s a break from training hard and training often, and scheduling a deload week is often how hard-charging athletes and weight lifters (a notorious bunch who never want to take a break) force themselves to recover from their pursuits. Exercise, you see, especially effective, intense, hard exercise, requires that we recover. It’s just like any injury, wound, illness, or stressor faced by our body. We have to recover before we can get stronger. In fact, you don’t get stronger from the act of lifting weights. You get stronger by recovering from the act of lifting weights. 

Learn more at The Deload Week: What It Is, How to Do it, and Why It Might Help You Get Stronger

Anthropologist Herman Pontzer on Paleolithic energetics

In a recent post, I commented on the multi-institutional research study, published in the July 25 of Plos ONE, that challenges conventional wisdom on the role of an active lifestyle in preventing obesity. Anthropologist and the lead author Herman Pontzer discuss the study in The New York Times article Debunking the Hunter-Gatherer Workout:

The World Health Organization, in discussing the root causes of obesity, has cited a “decrease in physical activity due to the increasingly sedentary nature of many forms of work, changing modes of transportation and increasing urbanization.”

This is a nice theory. But is it true? To find out, my colleagues and I recently measured daily energy expenditure among the Hadza people of Tanzania, one of the few remaining populations of traditional hunter-gatherers. Would the Hadza, whose basic way of life is so similar to that of our distant ancestors, expend more energy than we do?

The short answer: no. The study, while adding some subtle complexity to the role of physical activity, strongly points to the nutritionaly deficient Western diet as the primary cause of the obesity epidemic:

All of this means that if we want to end obesity, we need to focus on our diet and reduce the number of calories we eat, particularly the sugars our primate brains have evolved to love. We’re getting fat because we eat too much, not because we’re sedentary. 

I would add: we eat too much of the wrong things. It is much harder to overeat when the diet consists of lean meats, fish, vegetables, fruits, nuts and berries, and contains, minimal, if any, grains, refined sugars, or dairy. While physical activity is important to great health, its major role is improving cardiovascular, neurological, and musculoskeletal health rather than reducing weight.

Physical activity is very important for maintaining physical and mental health, but we aren’t going to Jazzercise our way out of the obesity epidemic. 

Related Posts

• Do hunter-gatherers really burn more calories per day?

Extreme exercise and the heart

When you’re sitting around, you heart is pumping about five quarts of blood a minute, and if you run up the stairs or hard or push yourself physically, it can go up 35 or 40 quarts a minute. If you go and run for 26 miles, or do a full-distance triathalon, it completely overtaxes the heart. The heart is pumping 25 quarts a minute for hours and hours, and that starts to cause muscle fibers to tear, which leads to a bump in troponin and other enzymes associated with inflammation, and it causes the death of some muscle cells in the heart.

Dr. James O’Keefe
Time Healthland

Low-carb ultramarathoner wins at record-breaking pace

Earlier this summer, Steve Phinney and Jeff Volek, authors of The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Performance, headed to theWestern States 100-mile Endurance Run, to study how runners in this grueling race fared, literally, for they were checking how the athletes performed, AND how they ate.  Steve Phinney says that more and more endurance athletes are choosing low-carb, high-fat. They’re choosing this diet both to get over digestive problems that hit in such a demanding event, and to win the race, and win it BIG!  That’s what Tim Olson did this year.  A self-proclaimed low-carb eater, Tim won the race — with a record-breaking pace.  

Shelley
Me & My Diabetes 

Do hunter-gatherers really burn more calories per day?

Daily activity of the Hadza. Image: Andreas LedererI often see persons in the office with neurological complaints such as headaches, dizziness, difficulty with memory and thinking, or alterations in mood that also have a BMI (Body Mass Index) in the obese category. A common reason offered for not being able loose weight is their inability to exercise.

Conventional wisdom holds that hunter-gathers maintain a normal weight through a combination of the Paleolithic diet and an active lifestyle that burns more calories. According to a new multi-institutional study, Hunter-Gatherer Energetics and Human Obesity published in the July 25 of Plos ONE, this conventional wisdom seems to be incorrect. As described by Science Codex:

The research team behind the study, led by Herman Pontzer of Hunter College in New York City, along with David Raichlen of the University of Arizona and Brian M. Wood of Stanford measured daily energy expenditure (calories per day) among the Hadza, a population of traditional hunter-gatherers living in the open savannah of northern Tanzania. Despite spending their days trekking long distances to forage for wild plants and game, the Hadza burned no more calories each day than adults in the U.S. and Europe. The team ran several analyses accounting for the effects of body weight, body fat percentage, age, and gender. In all analyses, daily energy expenditure among the Hadza hunter-gatherers was indistinguishable from that of Westerners. The study was the first to measure energy expenditure in hunter-gatherers directly; previous studies had relied entirely on estimates.

However, this does not mean you shouldn’t exercise:

The authors emphasize that physical exercise is nonetheless important for maintaining good health. In fact, the Hadza spend a greater percentage of their daily energy budget on physical activity than Westerners do, which may contribute to the health and vitality evident among older Hadza. Still, the similarity in daily energy expenditure between Hadza hunter-gatherers and Westerners suggests that we have more to learn about human physiology and health, particularly in non-Western settings.

Bottom line: The type of food consumed matters tremendously! The key factor in loosing weight is what you select at the grocery store or restaurant! Low-grade chronic inflammation resulting from the modern diet and the impact of modern foods on the brain's regulation of eating behavior are the prime suspects in the obesity epidemic. Returning to the ancestral human diet is the most powerful tool for reclaiming a normal weight.

Related Links

• An "Insight of the Decade": Chronic inflammation kills
• Inflammation impairs frontal lobe brain function 
• Paleolithic Nutrition: Chronic Inflammation
• Getting fatter on the typical Western diet
• New hypothesis: Acellular carbohydrates promote obesity
• “Fascinating insight”: Inflamed cells circulating in bloodstream
• Paleolithic Nutrition: Diabetes and the Modern Diet
• Success Stories 

MovNat Environmental Principle

This principle emphasizes the need for moving naturally…in nature.  Nature is the cradle where we have tested human natural movement abilities over millions of years of evolution.  While it is fundamental that you learn to navigate your body through any environment, including indoor environments,  it is especially important that you learn to move your body through natural environments.  Natural environments typically provide more variety than indoor environments, which stimulates adaptability, alertness, and reactivity.  Though you may never master your environment, you may learn to master how you will move through it.

MovNat

This Mother’s Day give the gift of brain health

University of British researcher Teresa Liu-Ambrose, PhD, P.T. and her associates published a study in the April 23 Archives of Internal Medicine that revealed older women improved mild problems in thinking and memory by performing resistance exercises. Megan Brooks, writing for Medscape Medical News, summarized the study:

Six months of twice-weekly resistance training (RT) improved executive function, associative memory, and regional patterns of functional brain plasticity in a group of older women with probable mild cognitive impairment (MCI).

In previous work, Liu-Ambrose had reported “improved executive function in cognitively healthy older women” who performed resistance exercises twice a week for one year. The current study suggests an even more powerful effect of resistance training: it can improve mild cognitive dysfunction in just six months.

Maybe this Mother’s Day, consider taking mom to the sporting goods store for some barbells.

Even more good news for mom (and dad)

Image: istockphotoIn addition to resistance training, daily activity is also important for maintaining brain health. A recent study published in the April 24 issue of Neurology found daily physical activity reduces the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease. Nicholas Bakalar, writing for The New York Times, notes the study:

….included 716 people, average age 82, without cognitive impairment. Each wore a wrist actigraph, a device that measures movement, for about 10 days to establish his or her usual level of daily physical activity. Over the next four years, 71 of them developed Alzheimer’s.

The research found those performing the highest level of physical activity reduced their risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease by half compared to those that were the least active.         

Maybe it’s is time to put the computer down and take mom and dad for a walk. If they have passed on as my parents have, walk in their memory.