Archive for the ‘exercise’ Category
HIT, mitochondria and health
and for a gentler form of exercise…
Jacinta: Well now, I know you’re dying to explore the recently touted benefits of your favourite exercise, so let’s have it.
Canto: Yes, I’m very much a HIT man, that’s high intensity interval training, highly recommendable because it takes so little time and only requires an exercise bike. I was put onto it by one of Michael Mosley’s documentaries, though I’ve been a rather theoretical enthusiast in recent times, having trouble overcoming my laziness and my pain-avoidance tendencies, because though it’s short exercise it is a little painful.
Jacinta: So the recent Catalyst episode has brought your enthusiasm surging back?
Canto: Naturellement, especially as it brings with it some new research to focus on. Mitochondria – what do you know about them?
Jacinta: That they are organelles in our cells, believed to have originated as bacteria but to have united with our eukaryotic cells way back in time in a process known as endosymbiosis. They’re also responsible for producing ATP, the energy molecules… though I’ve no idea how, or what an energy molecule actually is.
Canto: That’s music to my ears.
Jacinta: The dulcet tones of ignorance?
Canto: In the country of the blind the one-eyed science pundit is king, and I’d rather be a king than a commoner, so hear ye, my subject.
Jacinta: I may be blind but I’m all ears, Your Majesty.
Canto: Well, as the Catalyst program tells us, mitochondria are about a billion times smaller than a grain of sand, but the world at nanoscales has really opened up to us in recent decades. Mitochondria are good for us, and the more the merrier. And the evidence is that HIT exercise can not only increase the production of mitochondria but increase their function.
Jacinta: So how do we produce mitochondria?
Canto: Are you going to keep interrupting me with questions? Okay, the production of mitochondria relies on our oxygen intake. The story goes that we fill our lungs with oxygen and it enters the bloodstream for a specific purpose…
Jacinta: Hang on, we fill our lungs with air, not just oxygen, so how does the oxygen get separated, and how does the blood take up the oxygen? Aren’t you skipping a few steps here?
Canto: Yes, go and research it yourself and you can report on it next time. The destination of this inhaled oxygen is the mitochondria. There are billions of these mitochondria in our musculature, though the more fit and trained up you are, the more you’re likely to have. Mitochondria apparently comprise some 10% of our body mass, which I’m sure will come as a surprise. Now oxygen, as you know, acts as a corrosive through the process known as oxidation, which involves the loss of electrons…
Jacinta: Hang on…
Canto: Please shut up. So oxygen can have a negative effect on proteins, enzymes and even our DNA, but mitochondria uses this corrosive electron-stripping power to break down nutrients and to create energy in the form of adenosine triphosphate (ATP). Don’t ask! Of course this doesn’t just happen in humans but in all other mammals and complex creatures, and in plants. And that brings us to physical fitness, and the VO2 Max, which is, essentially, the measure of the fitness of our mitochondria. The term stands for volume (V), oxygen (O2), and of course maximum, though generally those concerned with aerobic fitness don’t make the association with mitochondria, they’re just looking at increasing their maximum oxygen consumption levels. Now it’s not an easy thing for impoverished nonentities like us to find out what our VO2 Max is, but it’s probably pretty pathetic. It’s something that endurance athletes tend to obsess about as they try to improve their performance – I believe rowers in particular have some of the highest levels. I notice there’s at least one VO2 Max app on the market – going very cheap too – but I’d be very sceptical about its reliability. In the testing facility shown on Catalyst they measure it via a version of HIT. They get the subject to ride an exercise bike, building up speed till she’s going as fast as she can, and she can go no faster and starts slowing down. That peak represents her VO2 Max. She will be tested 16 weeks later, after a mere 6 minutes of HIT a week, and you can bet your rented house that her VO2 Max will have substantially improved.
Jacinta: So for us low-lifes – excuse my interruption – who can’t easily or cheaply measure improvements in our VO2 Max or, say, our fat to muscle ratio, we just have to feel the difference in aerobic fitness, mitochondrial health and the like…
Canto: Yeah, and your weight will go down too, if you’re carrying a bit extra, as we both are. And the exertion will make you feel better and healthier, I guarantee it. We all know that the placebo effect is real after all. But seriously, I’m sure if we keep to a regime of HIT – say 3 bursts of 20-second full-pelt pedalling interspersed with a minute or so of more relaxed pedalling, or even if we start with 10-second bursts and then 15-second bursts, maybe eventually getting up to 30-second bursts, we’ll feel it getting easier, and it won’t be purely subjective even if we have no way of objectively measuring it.
Jacinta: But shouldn’t we consult a doctor beforehand? I already feel a heart-attack coming on.
Canto: I know you’re joking, but certainly anyone who has any kind of heart condition, or are diabetic or pre-diabetic or have any other serious chronic condition should discuss it with their GP, but really, apart from your couch potato tendencies, there’s nothing wrong with you.
Jacinta: You’re right, and I’m looking forward to the challenge, even though I’m already a to-die-for, effortlessly slim, perpetually twenty-two year old intellectual beauty..
Canto: And I’m the ultimate metrosexual hipster of indeterminate age and shoe size, discreetly tattooed and tucked…
Jacinta: Ah, yuck, you stupid twat, tattoos are the most repugnant fashion development of all time. At least you’re not a spornosexual, yuk, stay away from the gym or I’ll never speak to you again .
Canto: Promise? Anyway, around 35 is the average VO2 Max, but that’s a bit meaningless for us low-lifes as you say. Top athletes have levels in the 60s and 70s, with the highest ever recorded being around 96 or 97 for humans, but some mammals – like racehorses and Siberian sled dogs – can reach much higher levels. But there’s also going to be a big improvement in your fat-to-muscle ratio with regular bouts of HIT. In the Catalyst episode, the reporter took a DEXA body composition scan to measure this ratio. It also measures bone density. DEXA stands for Dual Energy X-ray Absorptiometry, that means you’re subjected to 10 minutes of very low-dose x-radiation at two different energy levels. It measures the relative densities of the different tissues. You can get this scan done in Adelaide, for a baseline measure, but it’ll probably cost an arm and a leg.
Jacinta: One way to lose weight. Cheaper to just take it for granted that you’re getting more muscular with every HIT.
Canto: Spoken like a true scientist. But generally, inactivity itself is a health problem, and anything that raises your metabolism, as HIT most definitely does, will be good for you, if it doesn’t kill you. And of course one of the most exciting findings in recent times is that your VO2 Max can be raised, with all the associated health benefits, without spending crazy amounts of time and money at the gym.
Jacinta: So how did they make this discovery?
Canto: Well I suppose they were doing a lot of experimenting and testing around the health benefits of exercise, but one test, a Wingate test, involved 30 seconds of all-out pedalling on an exercise bike, repeated a few times between periods of rest, to make up to two or three minutes of full-on exercise per session.
Jacinta: And this was for already-athletic types, right?
Canto: Yes – not advisable for middle-aged or post-middle-aged couch potatoes to start on that regimen. I’m currently doing three fifteen-second bursts, building up to 20-second bursts, then up to 30 seconds and no more. So researchers found that endurance levels can be dramatically improved after just six minutes or so of this kind of exercise. A doubling of endurance capacity, no less. Compare this to the current recommendations of 150 minutes a week. Who ever does that, apart from gym junkies?
Jacinta: So, it’s like this incredible short-cut to health.
Canto: Well of course it isn’t the solution to all ills, but among other things such a quick turn-around is a great motivator towards a healthier lifestyle all round. And it doesn’t have to be an exercise bike – you can adapt it, for example you can get yourself outside and do interspersed 30-second sprints, but I hate running and I’ve got a gammy knee so I’ll stay on the bike.
Jacinta: So, have they looked more into the actual science of this? What’s happening here?
Canto: Well again it seems to be about sucking in oxygen and providing a drug hit to the mitochondria. They did this rather nasty experiment with mice, genetically modifying them so that their mitochondrial DNA wasn’t functioning properly – their mitochondria were getting worn out. They looked pretty sorry-looking compared to the control mice, prematurely ageing as evidenced in their fur, their neural activity, heart function and sensory abilities. Their life-span was about half that of normal mice, and no drugs improved the situation. Then they set them on a treadmill regularly, 3 times a week, at a brisk pace, for 45 minutes each session, which you might think would’ve killed them off all the more quickly, but the result was a spectacular improvement in mitochondria production and overall health and energy levels.
Jacinta: And this was in genetically modified mice?
Canto: Apparently so. The program didn’t go into detail about that, except to say that the bad mitochondria were apparently being selected against. Now of course we’re talking about mice here, and this was looking at endurance fitness rather than HIT, but it’s been shown that HIT does all the right things, and in some areas performs better than endurance training. Reductions in blood pressure, improvements in insulin sensitivity, in muscle to fat ratio, in VO2 max all in a matter of weeks, but the really interesting finding was that with HIT, improvement in mitochondrial function was significant – which wasn’t the case after endurance training.
Jacinta: How do they know that?
Canto: They took muscle samples and measured the ability of the muscles to produce oxygen – basically a measure of mitochondrial function. After just four weeks of HIT, mitochondrial function improved by up to 30%, while endurance training over the same period showed little or no change.
Jacinta: Wow. Doesn’t say much for endurance training.
Canto: Well endurance training does improve your VO2 max and it’s hardly bad for you. But the thing with these quick sprints is the difference at the muscle level. Sports medicine distinguishes between fast-twitch, slow-twitch and intermediate muscle fibres. HIT uses a wider range of muscles and muscle types than endurance work, and that seems to be the key. Improvement in mitochondrial function confers a heap of benefits, so this kind of exercise wards off neurological and other conditions, including muscle weakness and epidermal deterioration, the tell-tale signs of ageing. In fact all exercise does this. Ever heard of the stratum corneum?
Jacinta: Mmmm, corneum, cornea, isn’t that part of the eye?
Canto: Excellent guess but wrong in this case. The stratum corneum is the top layer of the epidermis, the skin. It starts to thicken as you age, and the layer underneath gets thinner as your mitochondrial function reduces. You can slow down that process quite significantly with regular exercise. They did skin biopsies of sedentary people over 65 before and after endurance training. After just 3 months the skin showed great improvement – a 20 to 30 ‘youthening effect’, according to one researcher. The dead outer layer thinned, and the dermis, full of collagen fibres, thickened. So, clearly, you’re never too old to start.
Jacinta: Or never too young. So okay I’ll start.
Canto: Great, but let me describe one more impressive study, being done on menopausal women using HIT. Menopause is about a major decline in estrogen, which has serious vascular, heart and metabolic effects, as well as insulin resistance. You tend to produce a lot of bad visceral fat which negatively affects the liver, due to the over-production of cytokines – but that’s another story. Anyway, the women were given a sprint regime, of just a short period of fast peddling interspersed with more relaxing peddling, amounting to eight minutes of fast but not hard exercise all up. The results of this research haven’t been published yet, but the women’s self-reporting is all very positive, which isn’t surprising. The research is also based on previous research with obese young men, and the exercise proved very effective. Visceral fat is generally much easier to reduce than subcutaneous fat.
Jacinta: Okay, so we’re going to do this?
Canto: Absolutely. And finally, here are some links.
The Catalyst episode, http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/4319131.htm
https://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/health/sprint-fight-fat
High-Intensity Training and Changes in Muscle Fiber, [www.springerlink.com/content/1137px7x66667132]
exercise is medicine
I read recently that regular moderate exercise sloshes up the blood, washing immune cells from vessel walls. This brings those cells back into the mainstream so to speak, where they can be more effective in combating infection. It makes no small difference – a simple study in which 500 adults were tracked for 12 weeks found that those who engaged in regular aerobic exercise sessions were found to suffer considerably less from upper respiratory tract infections – precisely my personal area of concern. Levels of immune cells in the blood double during exercise.
There’s also good news in this for those of us who couldn’t become gym junkies no matter how hard we tried. Too much exercise (but that means quite a lot) can undo all the good by raising levels of cortisol, noradrenaline and other stress hormones, which alter immune cell functioning. Stress, though, is another one of those complex indicators of health. Mild bouts of stress can be healthful, again boosting blood levels of immune cells. So don’t relax too much, but don’t overdo it.
Even so, exercise helps with everything, and that’s something worth promoting because the recommended dose of exercise isn’t being swallowed by the majority of people in the west. Of course we’ve always kind of known about the benefits of exercise, but the hard evidence has really been coming in lately. A really interesting study was published in the Lancet in 1953, at a time when the rising incidence of heart attacks was becoming a worry. It compared bus conductors to bus drivers on London’s busy double-deckers. The conductors, who spent much of their working day running up and down steps, had half as many heart attacks as their driver colleagues. This landmark study has of course been followed by many others that have confirmed the positive effects of exercise in reducing the incidence of stroke, cancer, diabetes, liver and kidney disease, osteoporosis, dementia and d barkepression.
So what exactly is the goldilocks zone for exercise? Well, anything is better than nothing, and most of us know we’re not doing enough. I’m not quite a senior citizen yet, but studies have been done with the elderly requiring them to do 40 minute walks three times a week, which is hardly strenuous. I catch a tram to work, which requires a ten-minute walk each way, and then a five minute walk each way to my workplace – 30 minutes a day, five days a week, though it would doubtless be better if those 30 minutes were continuous, and if I didn’t dawdle much of the time. The benefits of such a regime have been shown through before-and-after brain imaging. Expansion of the hippocampi, either through the growth of new brain cells, or greater synaptic connectivity, and a restoration of long-distance connections across the brain.
Mental exercise shouldn’t be forgotten either. It has been known for a couple of decades that intellectual stimulation can provide a kind of ‘cognitive reserve’ which can buffer us against the kinds of physical brain deterioration typical of Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia, but clearer proofs of this have been gathered recently. Magnetic resonance imaging of Alzheimer’s sufferers has caught the goings-on in the brain while cognitive tasks are being performed. Highly educated people – brain workers if you will – are better able to develop alternative neuronal networks to compensate for damaged areas. I would assume though that it’s not so much about education but about brain usage. Keep tackling new things. Keep using your brain in new ways. And your body for that matter.
Cognitive reserve is now seen as a real thing, and has been pinpointed as residing in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a key area for learning, short term memory, attention and language. Increased activity in this area suggests flexibility in thinking and problem solving. Information processing efficiency is also a key to a healthy brain. Having a high IQ, something I’ve often been sceptical about in the past, is an indication of information processing efficiency, even if the information is often culturally specific. It appears that physical brain deterioration, from Alzheimer’s, stroke and and other causes, can be fended off by compensating neural network development and increased information processing efficiency in certain people, until the deterioration becomes too great to be compensated for, after which things tend to go downhill very rapidly. By the time the symptoms of Alzheimer’s appear in such people, the physical damage is already well advanced.
A major message from all this is that you should try to develop lifestyle habits involving physical and mental exercise. Always a work in progress.
I note that one of the in terms these days is ‘hat tip’ (h/t), so h/t for this piece to New Scientist, the collection, edition 3: a guide to a better you.
want to live to 100?
… It may destroy diseases of the imagination, owing to too deep a sensibility, and it may attach the affections to objects, permanent, important, and intimately related to the interests of the human species.
Humphry Davy, on the value of science, in ‘Discourse introductory to a course of lectures on chemistry’, 1802
A great many of us would like to live a long and healthy life, with a greater emphasis on health than length. But both please, if possible, thanks.
I’ve been reading the issues of New Scientist: the collection as they come out. The first issue dealt with the Big Questions, namely Reality, Existence, God, Consciousness, Life, Time, Self, Sleep and Death. Bit of a roller coaster ride, leaving me dizzy, confused, but often enlightened, and sometimes even exhilarated. So, better than a roller coaster. The second issue, entitled The Unknown Universe, took me far out beyond multiverses, quantum loops, energetic dark matter and the eventful horizons of black holes, and essentially taught me that modern cosmology is a mess of competing theories, often competing, it seemed, to be the most egregious ideas that are compatible with mathematical possibility. However, it may be that the studious avoidance of scary maths in these essays/summaries may have made them seem more loopy (or strangulatingly stringy) than they are.
The third issue was more down to earth, and not only earth but me, and you, dear reader. It’s entitled The scientific guide to a better you, and it’s all about longevity, health and success.
So what’s the secret, at least for the first two? Basically, eat healthily, with not too much meat, make sure you have good genes, don’t be too much of a loner (too late for me, I’ve been a loner for 40 years, and that’s unlikely to change, but I’l try, as I always say), be intelligent, active and exploratory. That’s the message of the first half of this issue anyway.
What interested me, though, was the detail. Measurements. Blood sugar, cholesterol, heart rate and many other factors and parameters, most of which I didn’t know I had to be concerned about. The various essays are peppered with these measures of health or lack thereof, but how does your average Jo like me get a measure of these things without pestering doctors on a weekly basis about wellness instead of sickness?
So, for fun, I thought I’d look into these ways of measuring ourselves and see if we can manage them from home. A sort of practical guide to centenarianism and beyond.
1. Body mass index (BMI)
Your BMI is a very rough-and-ready guide to whether or not you’re a healthy weight for your height. Various websites can calculate this for you instantly if you know your height and weight. My current BMI is 26, according to the Heart Foundation, which it regards as ‘overweight’, though very close to the borderline between ‘overweight’ and ‘healthy’. About three years ago my BMI was 29, well into the overweight category, in fact getting close to obese. I decided to eat less, without fasting or ‘going on a diet’, and to try to up my exercise, and over a 2-year period I brought my BMI down from 29 to 23, well into the healthy range. Since then it has crept back up to 26, and I’m struggling to get it back down again. I just need to lose a couple of kilos, and keep them off. The myriad other ways of measuring your health these days might make the old BMI seem outmoded – it doesn’t measure your fat to muscle ratio, for example, or the amount of fat around your heart and other organs – but I find it a useful guide for me, and the cheapest available.
2. Heart rate/blood pressure
Measured in beats per minute, your heart rate naturally varies with exertion, and also with anxiety, stress, illness, drug use and so on. The normal resting heart rate for an adult human ranges from 60 to 100 bpm. You can measure your own heart rate (your pulse) at any time by finding an artery close to the surface. The radial artery on the wrist, the one you see heading in the direction of the thumb, is commonly used due to ease of location, but don’t try it with your thumb which has its own strong pulse. I’ve just located my own wrist pulse and measured it as 62bpm. That’s the first time I’ve ever done it. However, I imagine it would be harder to measure after a bout of HIIT (high intensity interval training), which I sometimes indulge in, or after a moderately strenuous bike-ride. It would be even harder while you’re in the middle of exercise, so that’s where heart rate monitors, including those that can be worn on the wrist, come in handy. A quick google-glance tells me that such wrist devices are selling at $100 to $150. However, caveat emptor, as doubt is being cast on their accuracy. Electrocardiographs (ECGs, or EKGs), which measure the electrical activity of your heart, provide a much more accurate record than heart rate monitors, which are apparently only really effective when you’re at rest. One of the problems is that these optical monitors use light to track your blood, and to get an ‘accurate’ reading, you need to be very still, which sort of defeats the purpose. Reporter Sharon Profis, with the help of cardiologist Jon Saroff of Kaiser Permanente medical center in San Francisco compared various wrist monitor brands with the gold standard EKG measurements, and found them well off-beam especially at over 100 bpm. However, the Garmin Vivofit chest strap monitor, which measures electrical activity, was very accurate. This device can be bought for around $150 in Australia.
3. Cholesterol
Cholesterol’s an essential organic molecule, a sterol, a structural component of our cell membranes. It’s biosynthesised, mainly by our liver cell, often as a precursor to such vital entities as steroid hormones and vitamin D, and researchers have tracked the 37-step process of its synthesis. Cholesterol is transported through the blood within lipoproteins, and that’s where you get HDL (high-density lipoprotein) and LDL (low-density lipoprotein) cholesterol, of which the former is the one that causes problems. Some 32% of Australian adults have high blood cholesterol, the primary cause of atherosclerosis, leading to clogging of major blood vessels. Ways of lowering your LDL levels include not smoking, avoiding transfats, regular moderate exercise, and healthy eating including fruit, veg, grains and pulses and sterol-enriched foods. But of course you know all that. The big question is, can you measure your cholesterol from home? The current answer appears to be no, according to the Harvard Medical School (though I note that their article is 11 years old). The problem is that home testing kits can’t separate the ‘good’ HDL cholesterol from the ‘bad” (LDL). Measuring your overall cholesterol levels might be useful, but the real issue is the proportion that is LDL, not to mention that cholesterol can also be carried by other molecules such as triglycerides.
4. Blood sugar/glucose
Glucose is a vital source of energy for the body’s cells, and its levels are associated with the hormone insulin, produced by the pancreas. Blood glucose levels naturally vary throughout the day, and having a level regularly above normal is termed hyperglycemia. Hypoglycemia is the term for low levels. Diabetes (technically Diabetes mellitus) is the disease most commonly associated with high blood sugar. General symptoms are frequent urination, hunger pangs and increased thirst. The mean normal blood sugar level is around 5.5 mM (millimolars). That’s the international standard measure – the Americans measure it differently, which causes the usual confusion. Not surprisingly, considering the global rise in diabetes, blood glucose meters for use at home are readily available, but they’re mostly specially devised for use by diabetics, supervised by healthcare professionals. You can of course buy one and DIY but you must learn to be inured to pricks, and unless you’re at risk, which I’m not, as I don’t have much of a sweet tooth, don’t have particularly high cholesterol, and have never evinced any diabetic symptoms, it’s probably not worth the investment. The essential test associated with ‘pre-diabetes’ or hypoglycaemia is a glucose-tolerance test (GTT).
5. Sequence your genome
According to the Australian government’s National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC):
Rapid advances in DNA sequencing technologies now allow an individual’s whole genome to be sequenced. Although this is still relatively expensive, it is likely that in the near future it will become affordable and readily available.
Ah, that other country, the near future. But it is a fact that the price is coming down, from $10 million in 2005 to a mere $1 million in 2007 when James Watson’s genome was sequenced. The going rate in 2012 was under $10,000, and this year (2014) the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Sydney became one of only three institutes in the world to deliver whole sequenced genomes at under $1000. However, there’s a problem. Your genome will mean nothing to you without expert analysis and interpretation, at a hefty price tag. So what would be the purpose, from a health perspective, of ‘doing your genome’? If you’re already quite healthy, do you want to spend up to $1000 only to find out that you carry a gene which may pre-dispose you to a disease that’s currently non-preventable? Our genome is very complex, so much so that current thinking on the subject, and especially on the introns, the sections that don’t code for proteins, has become more cloudy than ever. We know, or think we know, that the number of introns an organism has is positively correlated with that organism’s complexity, but that’s about all we know for sure, and considering the enormous complexity of the interaction between genetics and environment, together with our lack of knowledge of the role of so much of our genome (over 98% of which is non-coding DNA), the question of whether it’s worth sequencing at this time is a live one. Of course if the price comes down to $100, or the price of a latte (which will soon be up around that figure) then it’d be well worth it; you would have it there awaiting scientific breakthroughs on all that non-coding stuff.
6. microbiome
If you’ve been paying attention to the world of human health, you’ll know that the microbiome is all the rage at the moment. the term was coined by Joshua Lederburg, who defined it thus, according to Wikipedia:
A microbiome is “the ecological community of commensal, symbiotic, and pathogenic microorganisms that literally share our body space.”
You may well have heard the impressive statistic that you have ten times more bacterial cells (and, most interestingly, archaean cells) growing on or in you than bodily (eukaryotic) cells, though this might become less impressive when you learn that the combined weight of those cells amounts to only a few hundred grams. Still, recent research on the microbiota has turned up some interesting results, especially for health. One finding, which may make it difficult to assess your own microbiome, is that different sets of microbes appear to perform the same function for different people. So you won’t just need to know the genetic content of your microbiome, but its function. Still, we can learn a lot already from our microbiome, according to Catalyst, the ABC science program. For example, we inherit a lot of bacteria from our mothers, via her breast milk, not only directly but because the sugars in breast milk encourage the growth of particular types of bacteria. Most of this gut bacteria does its work in the large intestine or bowel region. They’re anaerobic beasties, so they die when exposed to air. However, recent technological developments (and how often can that story be told) have allowed us to learn far more about them, by sequencing their genes inside the gut. From this we’ve learned that our gut bacteria are vital components of our immune system. And since these bacteria rely on our own diets for their nourishment, the kind of microbiome we have is profoundly related to what we eat. A diverse microbiome results, apparently, from eating a high-fibre diet, and low-fibre processed food, and the ingesting of antibiotics, is reducing that diversity, and contributing to multiple health problems. It appears that a less diverse microbiome finds itself under stress, leading to inflammation, an immune response that can damage our own tissue. As a sufferer from bronchiectasis, a chronic (and incurable) inflammation of the airways due probably to early childhood damage, I’m particularly concerned to limit the extent of inflammation through diet and exercise, so this is probably the aspect of my health I’m most concerned to monitor. And there’s also the relationship between gut bacteria and obesity. Some 62% of Australians are overweight or obese, and I’m one of that majority, and trying not to be.
It has been shown clearly, in mice at least, that a high-fibre diet reduces bronco-constriction, improving resistance to asthma and other airways conditions such as COPD. This is mainly due to the production of short-chain fatty acids by particular bacteria. The short-chain fatty acids are produced though the digestion of dietary fibre. Interestingly, acetate, found in vinegar, is a short-chain fatty acid, and a natural anti-inflammatory, so that’s something I should include regularly in my diet.
Finding out what your particular microbiome is, and how it might align with your health, is a simple if rather unpalatable and ‘intimate’ process. You can apply for a kit from the American Gut Project, an organisation dedicated to researching microbiota. The kit is for obtaining a sample of your ‘biomass’ as they call it, which you then send back to the AGP for analysis. All of this was spelt out in the above-linked Catalyst program, but since that program was aired two months ago, the AGP has been inundated with more biomass than it can deal with, so there’s been a backlog of logs, as it were. I plan to send for a kit anyway. The AGP sends back the results, apparently, with hopefully an analysis of the microbiome easy enough for a layperson to understand.
So there’s six areas to look at, either independently or with the help of your GP or other professionals, in terms of measuring how you’re going in terms of overall health, and there are many more aspects of your bodily chemistry and physiology to check up on – hormones, neurotransmitters, bone density, sight, hearing, lung capacity and so forth. Or you can follow the standard advice on diet and exercise, try to avoid stress and hope for the best. And above all don’t stop laughing and dancing, otherwise life would hardly be worth living.
can your shoes help you run faster?
time to ditch your adidas microbounce plus trainers for neutral to underpronating runners, with lightweight heel-to-toe bounce technology, etc etc – it’s all just a load of expensive shite unless you’re deeply into the status doo-doo
Some years ago, when I was a bit more financially solvent than I am these days, I went to a gym for a while, and even employed a personal trainer. I learned from that experience, thanks to some simple exercises the trainer put me through, and my own quick development through these exercises, that, once I’d gotten this kick start, I didn’t need the expense of a gym, or a personal trainer for that matter, which is just as well, as I soon went broke and abandoned both.
Since then I’ve been using a combo of my trainer’s tips and some CSIRO-recommended exercises to stay moderately in shape at home, happily far from the sight of buffed-up men hefting obscene weights, not to mention bubble-butted women with sweat sparkling from their flawless sun-tinted flesh..
Anyway, one of the things that sometimes worried me when I turned up for gym was my footwear. I noticed that most of the inhabitants wore all the ‘right’ gear including what looked like the latest state-of-the-art top-brand ‘gym shoes’ or running shoes or whatever. I wore a pair of $10 canvas slip-ons, and I always expected the trainer to query them, though I’d also heard or read somewhere that all these expensive ‘scientifically tested’ exercise shoes were a load of malarkey, and you’re possibly better off with good old-fashioned plimsolls, or even nothing at all…
So it was with some interest that I listened to a little segment on a recent science show podcast, dealing precisely with this subject. An English researcher, Mick Wilkinson, who’s also a keen amateur runner, has been looking at running barefoot v running shod, and he ran a half-marathon barefoot in 2011 just to test things out. He came out of it more or less unscathed in spite of some less than barefoot-friendly surfaces.
As to the evidence, much of it was a summary of what a Professor Lieberman of Harvard has found, findings published in Nature and a recent issue of New Scientist. Basically, Lieberman has found that we are born – that’s to say, evolutionarily adapted – to run, considering our skeleton and muscles, and issues of endurance and heat loss (the latter being an obvious consideration in going barefoot). An analysis of ‘peak impact forces and the rate at which those forces are absorbed by the body’ indicates that barefoot running, because it favours a ‘forefoot landing’, a type of foot strike pattern that’s associated with ‘a lower loading rate’ (presumably meaning less overall pressure), is less jarring than its alternative.
Looking at joint movements and rotational forces around the ankles and the knees, the evidence is that, with barefoot running, forces around the ankles are increased, forces around the knees are decreased. This is very interesting to me, as I stopped jogging years ago because one of my knees would stiffen up every time I did it. I was running in fairly basic running shoes, but more importantly to my mind I was running on a hard gravel track. Years later when I did a bit of jogging on grass I didn’t have a problem. Generally though I hate jogging and much prefer cycling, with a nice café at the end.
But what about the effect on the ankles? According to Lieberman the evolution of structures on the rear of the leg, the Achilles, the calf and the soleus (a powerful muscle in the lower calf) have generally evolved to cope with these stresses on the ankle region. More research needs to be done, but there are some pretty serious difficulties, as Wilkinson points out:
So we’ve got biomechanical aspects linking forces, we know that forces are theoretically linked to some kinds of injuries, but that’s where it stops. What is missing is the next piece of the puzzle which would be the randomised control prospective studies examining injury rates in people who are learning to run barefoot, people who are learning to run in shoes. But the design of the study would be so complex, it would be prohibitive. I mean, you’d have to get people who were matched for training history, matched for age, matched for injury status. In fact it would probably be better to start off with people who had never run at all and just say, right, randomly allocate you into a group who are going to learn to run in shoes, you’re going to learn to run barefoot, and then track them over a very long period of time to find out what injury rates are per so many thousand miles. But again, it’s so difficult to operationalise a study like that, probably why one hasn’t been done.
In any case these studies wouldn’t so much answer the question of whether you run faster in shoes, as whether you run better – that’s to say, with less general impact on the body. It, not quite the same thing, though they are connected. And obviously there are hazards in running barefoot in modern urban environments. But there doesn’t seem to be much evidence to support all the advertising claptrap trying to get you to buy ultra-expensive running shoes. In fact, there’s been little noticeable difference in times for running marathons – the real test for shoes v bare feet – in spite of, not only high-tech footwear but all the other-high tech analysis in terms of diet, running technique and so forth. Wilkinson tells us that the American distance runner Steve Prefontaine still holds the American marathon record from the early seventies (Prefontaine was killed in a car crash in 1975, aged 24), and he always wore a standard pair of plimsolls.
So it looks like another case of advertising, and dare I say pseudo-science, winning out over the evidence..