Month: February 2009

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A Short History of Beverages and How the Body Treats Them

This is sort of a departure from the typical paper I talk on this website as it deals with the history of beverages and how our body treats them physiologically.   While interesting in its own right (to me anyhow), it also provides some practical application that I’ll examine at the end of the article.

I think it’s especially relevant after the research review I posted on high fructose corn syrup for the simple fact that people are confounding what the real issue actually is in terms of causal effects on obesity.  As you’ll see as you read this, the issue isn’t with HFCS per se, but rather with the foods in which they are most commonly consumed: sweetened soft drinks.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Specifically I will be looking at the following paper”

Wolf A, Bray GA, Popkin BM. A short history of beverages and how our body
treats them.… Keep Reading

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The Mercury Content of Fish

Fish has long been considered part of an athlete and “healthy” diet and there are many good reasons for this to be the case.  It’s a high quality protein and, depending no location and type, is generally inexpensive.  Low-fat fish is nearly fat free and higher-fat fish contains healthy w-3 fish oils.  At the same time not all is good in the land of fish due to the mercury content.

The Mercury Content of Fish

Mercury, as I imagine most know, is a toxic metal compound that, when it accumulates in the body, can cause a lot of problems.   Quite in fact, readers may have heard of the Mad Hatter syndrome which was actually caused by mercury being used by hatters back in the day.  The exposure caused them to go nuts.  It also gave us a great Batman villian.

The Mad Hatter

But that raises the question of how much fish can be safely consumed.   … Keep Reading

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The Baseline Diet

It’s common behavior among all trainees to try to be more advanced than they are.  It’s true of training and it’s true in nutrition.  I find that lifters, especially new ones, want to try all the cool sexy stuff before locking down the basics.  But the simple fact is that until you have the basics down, nothing else matters.  Why?  Because the basics always work.  They always have and always will.  And that’s what the baseline diet is about: it’s the basic diet that all lifters should get locked in before they consider anything else.

Some Pointed Questions

How much mass have you gained in the last few months (or years as the case may be)? If you’re like the average lifter, the answer is assuredly “Not as much as I’d like”.

Ok, next question: how much money have you spent on exotic supplements hoping they’d be the secret to freaky mass?… Keep Reading

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9 Ways to Handle Hunger on a Diet

Diets fail for a lot of reasons but one of the primary ones is simply hunger.   During a diet, hunger invariably goes up. Some of this is for purely physiological reasons, some of it is for psychological reasons.  Not that there is really a difference in the two.  And along with all of the other difficulties, this can derail the diet.    So let’s look at hunger.  What it is, what it represents.  And more importantly let me provide 9 ways to handle hunger on a diet.

What is Hunger?

To say that human hunger is complicated is a vast understatement.  To cover it in detail would require a series of articles or perhaps an entire book.  Research continues to uncover numerous interacting and overlapping hormones (such as leptin, ghrelin, peptide YY, GLP-1 and others) that monitor how much and what someone is eating (along with their body weight) and those all send a signal to the brain that drives a number of processes, not the least of which is hunger.… Keep Reading

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What Determines Endurance Performance?

In contrast to strength training which is about increasing the ability to produce force or increase muscle growth, endurance training is aimed at improving the ability to sustain a given speed or power power output for extended periods.  Like strength performance, there are number of physiological determinants of endurance performance.

That is, while increasing the total amount of force/power is clearly important (in that it will increase speed), being able to sustain that force/power for long enough to compete well is at least as important.

In this article, I want to look at the three primary determinants of endurance performance and talk a little bit about each. I’m not going to talk about the specific determinants of each or how to train for them; this is just meant to be an overview, introductory article on the topic.

The Importance of the Aerobic Engine

Strictly speaking, any event lasting longer than about 2 minutes can be considered an endurance event. … Keep Reading