I like to post these Digging Through the Archives blogs from time to time, as I know it can be easy to forget stuff you have read before, or maybe you missed some of these posts. Unless you read my stuff religiously, it can be tough to keep up!
Plus, it is often a good refresher for me, as sometimes even I forget some of the things I have written about in the past!
Snacks from the Past – this is a simple but often forgotten snack that I think more people would love to put back in their diet – Ants on a Log! I not only provide a recipe, I give you all of the health benefits associated with each food.
Why Eggs Prevent Heart Disease – this is one of my best blog posts ever in my opinion. While not a comprehensive review of the health benefits of eggs, that would go beyond the scope of this blog, it delves into several components of eggs and why the prevent heart disease.
More Good News for Grass-fed Meat – I discuss some sweet research showing that consuming grass-fed meat compared to grain-fed meat was able to raise levels of omega-3′s in the participants. Many people try to claim that difference in omega-3 content between the two meats is negligible, this study proved them wrong.
Everybody knows that the first rule of a post-training shake is that it has to be fast. You must drink it as soon as you are done or you won’t get jacked. You must drink the fastest protein on earth with only the fastest carbs, no fiber or fat allowed! This usually entails people drinking whey protein, either in the form of isolates or hydrolysates, because concentrates are just too darn slow. The carbs are usually from maltodextrin or dextrose, and maybe even that fancy new waxy maize starch. Anything with fiber , fat or fructose is terrible and will decrease absorption time. Right? We know all of this because that is what we have always been told. No one denies that this is effective, as it has worked for millions of people, but does effective equal optimal? What are we actually trying to accomplish with this shake?
I want to start this post with a bit of a disclaimer. The health benefits from alcohol consumption are hotly debated, as most of the data comes from epidemiological research and other relationship style studies, not cause-and-effect controlled trials. In addition there is no doubt that binge drinking or excessive consumption can cause massive problems, affecting nearly every organ and system in the body.
However, based on the data that is available, and the fact that historically many cultures have engaged in moderate consumption, I think a reasonable case can be made for the benefit of alcohol.
While wine, red wine in particular, gets most of the hype for the health benefits from alcoholic beverages, beer is no slouch in this department either.
Training for power is imperative as we age. In fact it is the first thing we lose as we get older. However there is a bright side. This is a quality that can be retained from proper training, and being to maintain it or at least drastically slow down its loss our quality of life would improve drastically.
(this is a 68 year old CP client whom I had the privilege of training many times)
Lets back up for a second though and actually define power. Power is Force x Velocity.
In terms of exercise the force is your strength, so strength training will most definitely help you to maintain your power output. However people not only lose their strength, or ability to produce force, they lose their ability to produce this force with any type of explosiveness, or velocity.
I apologize for the minimal content this week, it has just been a mad-house around here. Tons of grad school work all culminating at once since we are coming up on spring break. Plus taxes. Fun stuff.
The good news is that I will have a new article going up on t-nation.com relatively soon (once I finally finish it and send it to them) as well as my first article on wannabebig.com.
I also recently had a few articles go up on getprograde.com that I never even told you guys about! I thought today would be an appropriate time to let you guys know all about them, plus there are a few more in the pipeline that should be going up shortly!
As I am sure most of you have heard, diabetes is rapidly becoming an epidemic not only in the US, but worldwide. Diabetes can affect people of all ages, and it can increase the risk of cardiovascular diseases, vascular complications and amputations, blindness, immune suppression, kidney disease, Alzheimer’s disease and more.
In December of 2010 the Environmental Working Group published the first national investigation into our water supply and its contamination with chromium-6 (hexavalent chromium), a potential carcinogen. They looked at the water supply of 35 cities nation-wide, with 31 of them containing chromium-6.
I blogged about this report back in December if you want a quick refresher.
Due to this report, Washington is taking action. Senators Barbara Boxer (D-California) and Dianne Feinstein (D-California) introduced Senate Bill 79, which is the Protecting Pregnant Women and Children From Hexavalent Chromium Act of 2011.
First, I want to remind everyone that today is the final day of the introductory sale price for Lean Hybrid Muscle Reloaded. I have only done 1 session so far, but it is a killer! I have heard some more really great things about the program from Tony and EC as well, as they are a little farther along in it than I am.
If building a leaner, more functional and athletic physique is your goal, then this would be an absolutely fantastic resource for you. It balances strength, hypertrophy, power and conditioning, and allows you to tweak the parameters to emphasize one of those elements over the others, without neglecting any of them.
Plus, you risk absolutely nothing. If you’re not thrilled, simply return it within 30 days and Mike & Elliott will refund every penny – no questions asked! The sale expires at midnight tonight, so don’t wait!
Secondly, as some of you may know I am a big fan of youbars.com. This is a website where you can design your own protein bars, and the ingredients are real food, not loads of sugar alcohols, maltodextrins or artificial sweeteners. Instead you get things like peanut butter, almond butter, raisins, coconut, cacao, chia, flax, whey protein and so much more.
For those of you who own the Show and Go Nutrition Guidethere is a bar I designed that I put in the Recommended Recipes section. It is awesome. I highly recommend these bars, and now to sweeten the deal even more, if you type in the coupon code “bspbars” you get 10% off!
Pretty sweet huh? Well that’s it for today guys, two cool announcements, so check them both out!
I am very pleased to announce the newly available BSP Training & Nutrition Newsletter!
To sign up simply fill in the info on your right, and you will have immediate access to some cool stuff. I plan on this newsletter functioning as my RSS feed, as at the end of each week I will provide a small recap and link to each blog post so you can catch up on anything that you may have missed. This will also allow me to see which content and blog posts people read the most, and the least, allowing me to greatly improve what I write and cater the content better to you guys!
It will also provide exclusive content and cool new updates that may not appear on the blog itself. In addition by signing up I will send you my 20-page report “The Truth About Saturated Fat & Cholesterol.” In this report I really dig into the data and showcase how off-base the mainstream recommendations truly are.
All of that combined will clearly make you so much more awesome, how could you not sign up! This is a completely FREE service, and you can unsubscribe at any time if you wish (though who would want to?), so feel free.
If you have any questions at all, don’t hesitate to shoot me an email. Enjoy!
One thing that I believe has become pervasive in this country is this idea that things that have become common, are therefore now “normal”. To my mind this could not be further from the truth. Eating the crappy Standard American Diet (SAD) is common, but it should be considered a normal diet. It is hardly full of any real food!
In addition, being overweight has become more common than not being so. Being overweight is not a physiological norm. Look at the data from our own country 30 years ago, and this was not the case. Look at traditionally-living societies, and it is anything but common. Diabetes is also becoming normal, but hardly existed at all in traditionally-living people.
I say this not to insult anyone, but to simply point out the fallacy that just because something has become common, it is now normal. I also point this out so that when you are looked at strangely because you eat whole eggs rather than just whites, or you consume full-fat organic dairy rather than fat-free conventional, or even because you choose to cook with butter (grass-fed of course) rather than vegetable oil I want you to realize that while these things may be uncommon now, in the history of human consumption these are very normal actions.
What passes for “normal” these days is far from. We have strayed very far from our physiological norms, mainly due to the now-common practices of eating excessive sugar, refined flour, industrial vegetable oil, genetically modified and/or heavily sprayed produce and crops, and inhumanely raised and poorly-fed animals. How did that become “normal”?
While it may suck to be at parties or social events where people question your eating habits because what and how you eat isn’t “normal”, I personally think you are much better off being rather uncommon and armed with the knowledge that while what and how you eat may not be common, it is certainly normal.
Through the course of reading some blogs and articles I came across this reference to the “Israeli-paradox” that I found rather interesting. While many people are familiar with the “French-paradox”, since the French consume rather large amounts of saturated fats yet have an incredibly low heart disease rate for a developed nation. In reality this shouldn’t be considered a paradox at all, but that is another story for another day.
Anyway, this “Israeli-paradox” is that one that I think should be looked at more closely. I was going to rewrite the abstract here in my own words, but it is a beauty, so I will just post it instead:
“Israel has one of the highest dietary polyunsaturated/saturated fat ratios in the world; the consumption of omega-6 polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA) is about 8% higher than in the USA, and 10-12% higher than in most European countries. In fact, Israeli Jews may be regarded as a population-based dietary experiment of the effect of a high omega-6 PUFA diet, a diet that until recently was widely recommended.
Despite such national habits, there is paradoxically a high prevalence of cardiovascular diseases, hypertension, non-insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus and obesity-all diseases that are associated with hyperinsulinemia (HI) and insulin resistance (IR), and grouped together as the insulin resistance syndrome or syndrome X. There is also an increased cancer incidence and mortality rate, especially in women, compared with western countries. Studies suggest that high omega-6 linoleic acid consumption might aggravate HI and IR, in addition to being a substrate for lipid peroxidation and free radical formation. Thus, rather than being beneficial, high omega-6 PUFA diets may have some long-term side effects, within the cluster of hyperinsulinemia, atherosclerosis and tumorigenesis.”
While this is not direct cause-and-effect research, it certainly shows a relationship between their intake and the long-term results. For those of you who don’t speak scientist, what they are essentially saying is that the Israeli population, with their high intake of polyunsaturated fats, have a greater incidence of cardiovascular disease, hypertension, type 2 diabetes, obesity, cancer and mortality!
For a long time on this blog I have been railing against people consuming large amounts of industrial vegetable oils, which are far and away the largest sources of omega-6 polyunsaturated fats. Hopefully researchers in the US begin to recognize that while polyunsaturated fats may “lower” LDL (probably through artificial means, as they probably just make the LDL small and dense, lowering the “measured” amount, which makes them more prone to oxidation and becoming atherogenic, but I digress) and therefore theoretically “decrease” risk of cardiovascular disease, they are not actually decreasing cardiovascular disease! And in the process they might actually be increasing the risks of CVD, along with diabetes, obesity, cancer and overall mortality!
Posted on March 2nd, 2011 by Brian St. Pierre
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