Low Carb or Activity for maintaining good health?
 

Hey, here's an idea; Why not do both?

http://www.globalhealthminders.dk/t...of-east-africa/

inspired by Mama Sebo journal noting that she studied the Massai - maybe not the diet but the peoples.

Look at how beautiful this is? Jumping dance from Wikipedia - I say dump the sugar and start to Jump!

I would say both, too. I don't feel as well if I don't do both some intensity type training, like lifting weights, and a fair amount of low intensity movement as well.

"You can't outrun a bad diet" might be better expressed as "you can't outrun the worst diets," I think you probably can make a difference with an almost-good diet.

I was always better at jumping down than jumping up. Probably because I started closer to the ground than a lot of the other kids during my developmental years.

Fitness and health are not the same. Neither are activity and diet. It's not possible to outrun any physical disorder of any kind whatsoever, including obesity. To illustrate, consider health as the basis for fitness, or the potential for fitness. The higher this potential, the greater the benefits of activity, but no amount of activity can compensate for a lack of this potential.

Think of Pottenger's cats and generational epigenetics. With subsequent generations eating a equally bad diet, health gets worse and worse until a point of infertility. For any particular generation, it's possible to begin restoring health back to optimal over the next few generations by using an adequate diet, but it's impossible to do it for the current generation. It's even less possible to do that with activity alone.

Now consider two individuals with less-than-perfect health. They have the same fitness potential, but neither have the best possible potential. Now put one on an exercise regimen, while we keep the other on a bench. The one doing some activity will appear to improve his health, but only because his health is the potential for fitness, and his fitness has improved compared to the guy on the bench, but only so much as his health allowed.

Now consider two individuals, one with perfect health, the other not. Put both on an exercise regimen, the one with perfect health has the potential to reach the best possible fitness, while the other has a lesser potential. The point is that the one with less-than-perfect health cannot possibly reach the same fitness level as the guy with perfect health, because his potential - health - is less.

We can see this with sports teams and some individuals adopting a low-carb diet as a way to improve their game performance, and it works quite well, but now imagine if we started this with their parents, and their parents, and so forth, until we finally restored perfect health for the individual a few generations down the line. His health will be that much greater, so his fitness potential - therefore his game performance potential derived from the same amount and quality of practice - will also be that much greater.

Oh yeah, forgot. Fitness is not just physical ability to perform, it's also neurological ability to perform. This is due to the fact that strength for example is neuro-muscular in nature, so the act of practice, even if muscles don't grow bigger, produces greater strength and the ability to lift heavier weight for example. In my case for example, I play golf, and I have an extensive amount of practice in my bag, so while I'm not physically fit, I am certainly able to perform the required motions with a much greater degree of precision compared to somebody without that practice in his bag.

So, with practice and study, we develop, improve and maintain skill. This means fitness is skill, or at least in large part skill. This is pertinent for fitness where we need time, endurance and something called strength-endurance to practice enough to improve skill, to improve fitness for any particular activity. The very act of practice requires health for an adequate amount of practice to be done, so the act of practice cannot in and of itself compensate - well, it can but not fully - for any lack of health. It can compensate for a little bit, because with practice, we improve skill, you see?

I would say both, as long as one realizes that they provide different benefits for improved health.

You see obesity as a physical disorder? Or do you mean that more than activity must be changed in order to correct the condition?



Couldn't that 2nd pair also be the first pair, but farther along their journey towards optimal health?

I agree maybe halfway with what Martin is saying--fitness can be as much a symptom of health, as a cause of health. But that could be true of diet as well--of course eating in a certain way will be more conducive of health, but also how a person eats could be symptomatic of their physical/neurological health, as well.

Fitness and skill--here I'd throw in that effects of exercise on the brain, neural plasticity, etc. work in with the development of skill, this is also an aspect of health and wellness.

"You cannot outrun a bad diet,"--I'd like to rephrase that, to there's no exercise program you can't ruin the benefits of through diet. Can you run fast enough to make twinkies a superfood? I don't think so. Can you enhance the effects of a reasonable dietary regime, with a reasonable exercise program? I think so.

A twenty year old man adds exercise, goes from slightly more muscular than his friends to much more muscular than his friends. This might arguably be a fitness improvement rather than a health improvement. An eighty year old man, sarcopenic and osteoporotic, takes up exercise and regains some of that lost muscle and bone mass, this is arguably both a fitness and health improvement--even if you argue that more muscle isn't necessarily more health--improvements in balance and strength mean that he's less likely to fall and break something, not falling and breaking something is a pretty important contribution to health at that age. "Use it or lose it" is fitness gospel, that applies to body and brain both.

Well i love jumping....Is there a trampoline in the ground? :)

Yes, obesity is a physical disorder, more specifically a disorder of excess fat accumulation.

The two pairs are different in both their health and their activity.

It's important to specify what physical disorder we're talking about so we understand the actual potential for improvement just from activity. For example, Teaser made the example of a young man and an old man, that's another pair where one is young and healthy, while the other is old and sick.

So let's look at that pair in detail. The young and healthy guy, he's got no physical disorder, his potential for fitness is greatest. But why does the old guy have a lesser potential for fitness? Is it just because he's old? Doesn't make sense, age has nothing to do with health. But disease acts over time, therefore the more time we're sick, the older we get, the sicker we get. We're not sicker because we're older, that's just incidental. Both age and disease progress simultaneously, that's why we make the assumption "age-related diseases".

To illustrate, take a kid, make and keep him sick all throughout puberty. As he reaches adulthood, he's still sick and moreso than he was when he was still a kid, but it's certainly not because he's an adult that he's sick or more sick, right? No, puberty acts over time, so he's grown into an adult independently of any disorder, but the disorder he's been suffering from has been progressing too, so he's sicker also because of time. It's no different when we start with an adult, then let him grow old or older. There's no a priori reason for health to decline, and if health does decline, it's not because of time, it's because there is an actual disorder acting over time.

Worded differently, the complete list of all known disorders does not include growing old(er). Growing older is normal, but it's not normal that we also grow sick for no other reason than time.

If we also include practice into the mix of growing old, isn't it plausible that our cells should be better at doing their thing of maintaining their integrity, in maintaining the body's health? They've been doing it for decades now, they must be genuine experts by now. If that's true, why do the facts prove this wrong?


Absence of activity is not a disorder, it cannot cause disease. This is because even though we are not active, our body is alive and maintains its health independently of its apparent activity. This means the baseline for health is perfect health. But what does it mean to be alive in the context of health? It's the cells doing their thing according to their DNA, that's it. Is there any gene that purposely makes us sick as we grow older? Absurd. The implication would be that we are programmed to grow sick and die at a predetermined time. Are we?

I'm off on a big tangent here but that's where the question of health and fitness leads inevitably as we dig deeper.

Fitness is improved through practice alone; health determines the potential for fitness; while practice appears to improve health, it merely does so because fitness and health tend to track together without any additional effort, so improving one will appear to improve the other as well.

Does our DNA control this ability to learn? Yes, more appropriately it possesses this ability. If it didn't, it would be impossible to learn and develop skills, fitness would be fixed at conception and could never be improved. It's even possible that growth would be impossible without this ability to learn, because growth stops eventually once we reach adulthood, and without the ability to learn when to stop, growth wouldn't start and if it did it wouldn't stop. The point here is that disease can be seen as disruption of DNA, therefore disruption of the ability to learn. However, DNA also includes the ability to learn about the disorder itself. But, there is no ability to overcome chronic disruptive pressures, i.e. a bad diet. We can see this with Pottenger's cats and generational epigenetics.

Now imagine a lean sprinter and a fat sprinter (more accurately, a light sprinter and a heavy sprinter). Both are lean and fat through their genes, nothing else, no disorder of any kind, their DNA is what it is without having been messed with, they are both in perfect health otherwise. Both are as fit as can be for the purpose, they can both run as fast as is possible according to their overall physiology. Which one wins? The lean one, the light one. To illustrate, let's pit a formula 1 car and a 10 wheeler truck. Which one wins?

Now we ask, can either of them get leaner or fatter just by doing more or less sprints? No, activity or lack thereof does not have the capacity to change their physiology in this respect. However, since we maintain skill through practice, we can improve (or in this case, maintain) or reduce skill with more or less practice.

Now let's look at our cells and wonder what happens as we grow older. If cells maintain the body's health, and if health declines as we grow older, doesn't that imply that our cells in fact practice less and less as time goes by? There's no a priori reason for this, so there must be some disorder going on, and this disorder only grows worse as time passes, or keeps constant pressure that accumulates and gradually overcomes the cells' ability to compensate, i.e. wear and tear or something like that. Well, when we're sick but still young, it's the same principle.

We could go on another tangent, hormones, it's quite interesting.

Interesting points by Martin. Just keep in mind that DNA provides the parameters controlling a broad spectrum of traits and potential. In other words, traits governed by DNA can be turned on or off by many factors including environmental factors, which in this case would include dietary exposure and activity levels. These DNA parameters are simply traits, behaviors, or other physical manifestations that can be exhibited or not due to environmental exposure. These manifestations are simply following the DNA blueprint and are not the result of recent DNA mutations; rather, they occur at the cellular level due to whatever it is the individual is exposed to over the course of time. DNA does not have time to mutate from one generation to the next, but it does provide the blueprint for one to express or suppress traits. This expression or suppression occurs at the cellular level and is the reason for the interest in Epigenetics today. I've referenced a book by Bruce Lipton before, and it's a very good summation of this epigenetic dynamic. It relates well to the environment we expose ourselves to through diet and physical activity and explains the reasons for varied manifestations of traits related to health and metabolic response.

Biology of Belief, 10th Anniversary Edition by Bruce Lipton

Fascinating book and very relevant to our pursuit of a perfect human diet, or rather, a perfect N=1 WOE.

The most obvious is deficiency.

No amount of jumping can create vitamin B12 (or the essential of your choice). Conversely, we need B12 to jump for any significant amount of time, or at all if deficiency is severe.

With hormones, it's a similar principle. A testosterone deficiency for example, cannot be overcome by any amount of weight lifting, in spite of the stimulus this creates. Lifting weights stimulates testosterone production, so it rises, but only as high as the regulatory systems allow. If these systems are disrupted to a point where testosterone production is lower, that will be the maximum level achievable by lifting weights alone. Conversely, testosterone alone can cause muscle growth (among other things, like more hair and more manly features, etc) independently of the amount of weights we lift, this is even more true as a child grows because that's when hormones have the greatest effects. Growth hormone is the most potent hormone (opposite insulin), same principle.

In a similar vein, though, send somebody into space, they'll lose bone and muscle mass. Or give them excessive bed rest, it hasn't been established that diet alone can make up for these, any diet.

Can exercise improve b12 status? I can think of one way--increased appetite. It's often pointed out that exercise can work against weight loss, but then weight loss is not always the desired outcome. Exercise can improve recovery of lean mass, with starvation, or improve the ratio of lean to fat mass put on (I'll say improve, because it pushes things closer to what they would have been without deprivation) at a given protein intake.

Just like food, exercise is an input that has an effect on hormonal expression, so just like food, I don't think you can say, this is hormonally controlled, so exercise lacks relevance.

Can you be healthy without being fit? Well, I'm not fit to run a marathon, I think I can be healthy without that. I'm not fit to be on the Canadian Olympic gymnastic team, hopefully that's not a requirement... but let's make this average person useful, I can climb a hill or stairs, I can bend over and tie my shoes, I can stand all day working without a whole lot of discomfort, I can squat. At some point you get diminishing returns, when it comes to health, optimizing for strength, speed, endurance are not optimizing for health--but I do think enough activity to develop decent balance, reasonable strength, a spring in your step is conducive to health, how much exercise is optimal, we don't know, I think we do know that being sedentary is not optimal, though.

Exactly, different influences on health by diet and activity (is exercise the right term?). If one is not fit, it makes it harder to obtain food for diet, whether it was a situation during the Paleo period or a current situation today that requires a certain level of good health to function most optimally in a job providing the means to acquire healthy food. The idea of being fit today lacks a clear definition, as many (I was one myself for years) tend to overdo fitness pursuits to achieve what is really a necessary baseline for a fully functioning human. Chronic cardio is not necessary for health or fitness.

Teaser, you talk about "enough activity to develop [various skills]".

In my experience with extensive golf practice and a bunch of other stuff I got hooked on over the years, the first few hours of practice are the most productive, the most instructive and produce the largest improvements in terms of ability to perform (relative to baseline zero). A few hours won't make one an expert, but it will certainly make him better by a wide margin, wide enough to brag to his golf partners at least.

Now the point here is that the amount of activity that is enough to make it seem like we've improved is likely to be actually small. If we're talking fads, golf is king. Every week, nay, every day, there's some new fad about some fancy advice about some complex technique about some mysterious skill about...you get the picture. Nobody actually practices golf, except the pros. With every new thing, we all get excited and this fools us into thinking we've improved in some way. We haven't, not exactly, it's just that the systems that control learning also control pleasure, and it's so very easy to stimulate one to give the illusion we've activated the other. The hormone responsible here is dopamine.

The second point here is that we learn much more quickly when it's fun, and it's most fun when it's new because dopamine is highest when; we're learning, and learning something new. From an evolutionary point of view, this makes perfect sense, we don't have ample time to learn how to survive. We learn now, or we die. Those that live, pass on the quick-learn gene.

I don't want to brag but I figured out two sure-fire lessons that take only a few seconds to teach to anybody to produce instant positive and significant results on the spot. In golf, we call them tips, but I promise those are genuine lessons that bypass about 99% of all the golf BS and it goes straight to the crux.

Anyways, you see my point, it's about the first few hours we're exposed to something new.

Well, yeah, but maybe what I take from your perspective is that we should try new things on a regular basis. And--it doesn't take as much to maintain a skill as it does to gain it in the first place, you never forget how to ride a bicycle, but not doing it for a very long time will make you significantly worse at it, at least it does me. I'm right there with you with making things fun and interesting. Some weirdoes find running fun--one man's fun/slightly hormetic stressor is another man's hell.

To be fair, I think I found a way activity can improve health. It's highly specific and pointy, but it's valid. Several years ago when I started lifting weights, I found out about HIIT and how it worked. Apparently, it causes a significant increase in number of mitochondria. The logic is simple from there. The more mitochondria, the more energy for the cell, the better the cell can maintain its integrity, the better the body's overall health.

So whatchathink?

Regarding mitochondria improving due to exercise? It's been a well-known fact that not only do mitochondria increase in numbers, but existing mitochondria become more efficient at energy production with regular exercise. Fully agree. This is one of the key benefits of physical activity and why it is healthy. It may not be a primary requirement for losing weight, but it helps the metabolism immensely.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releas...71016144846.htm



That ending... if this was about sausages, nobody hesitates about telling people to stop eating sausages, with equally weak evidence. :p I do agree with this, just think the sausages should get the same benefit of the doubt.

Plaque buildup may be of the more stable kind. True. But if high exercise correlated with less plaque, do you think they'd have suggested that maybe it was of the more dangerous, less stable kind? Doubt it. This stable plaque, people love it, allows them to declare victory, whatever the results.

Maybe it was all that carb loading, juicing and other such eating habits often done by health conscious athletic types. And I'm sure these guys were eating more than the average Joe. Calories in - calories out, you know. Would a white guy athletic type eating a low carb / high fat diet have the same negative results with their heart calcium score? Who knows what role diet plays in all of this? A poor diet may counteract benefits from exercise. Exercise may even contribute to the problems caused by a poor diet. I see the same possibility with people wearing out knees and hips jogging their arses off. Perhaps a better diet would not result in the same level of joint damage. I know everything does not come down to diet, but I have come to believe that diet plays a much bigger roll in overall health than most experts believe.

From a post earlier in this thread...


I tend to agree with this. Over the summer I was eating an almost good diet (LC, but higher carbs that I had been doing). I was not tracking my food intake, trying to eat to satiety. I was also doing more activity than ever over the summer. Weight crept up a pound or two. I was not too concerned. Then after my vacation in August I inexplicably stopped doing my regular walking routine. It was very hot and humid, so I wasn't doing much towards the house painting/repair project either. I became quite inactive compared to what I had been doing. To the best of my knowledge, eating was about the same. But the results on the scale were not. Over the next 5 or 6 weeks I saw a steady rise. I had to nip that in the bud. I'm back to tracking my food and getting my daily walks in. I'm now eating a good diet again and seeing positive results with the scale. I can't help but think that all that physical activity that I did over the summer had to be of some assistance keeping my weight in check while eating less than optimally.

Right, if the results don't make sense, make something up that is plausible based on the inaccurate prevailing belief. I'd like to have them confirm the type of plaque involved, however, there's a lot more of the findings of this study that must be further investigated.

The article about the Maasai barely touched on diabetes, but exercise is very important for regulating blood glucose. I knew that Dr. B. highly recommends exercise, but I was having a hard time sticking to it.

With my increasingly better diet, my bg was going down, but not as low as it should have been. It wasn't until I started exercising every day that my fasting bg went down into the 70s & 80s. I do most of my exercising in the morning before breakfast (good incentive!) & again either just before or after lunch.

I presume black women are included in "black participants". I can't think of any possible explanation for these apparent gender and racial differences.

450 minutes averages to 64 minutes a day. I wonder if there was another subset of people being way over that, because that doesn't seem that much to me. I do that, but then I'm not working, with a family, etc. so maybe it is.

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsa...unter-gatherers

A blood pressure post got me looking for something on blood pressure in the Hadza hunter-gatherer group, I came across this and it made me think of this thread.



I feel like there's a slight over-sell here. 135 minutes a day sounds like a lot of "exercise." But considering that that's over the course of a day working, it's not really that much compared to anybody with a somewhat physical job. 135 minutes a day leaves lots of time left over for more sedentary activity.

And here;



There are suggestions that just minutes of all-out activity can show benefit. This study doesn't sound to me like it was designed to capture whether or not the Hadza engage in these sorts of short burst often enough to benefit. I don't think anybody has to check to see whether the kids do, when I was a kid most of the time I was active was sort of a lazy ramble, but sprinting to side-aching breathlessness occurred often enough. Near maximal efforts are brief, maybe easy to miss.

This is in no way scientific. Just n=1 experience.

Throughout my working life, I made certain that some of my jobs were physically demanding. I considered every day doing that like money in the bank for when I got older. I had several years of hard labor banked.

Now that I've gotten to "older" I have to share the importance of using all muscles on a regular basis. If this doesn't happen, it results in loss of range of motion and overall strength.

Example: Day before yesterday I did lap swimming for the first time in 5 years. I was stunned at my loss of ability. Additionally, every one of the muscles I used was sore for the next 24 hours.

I'm 72, healthy, and at (I guess) a normal weight due to my eating plan.

My 2 Cents.

That's my experience too. I need to keep up my walking schedule, especially the hill walking, if I am to maintain my strength and endurance. I hate to think of what would happen to my muscles if I returned to a sedentary life style.

Jean

I know what happened to my muscles - as well as my blood glucose. A couple weeks ago my knee went out on me. I have gradually been able to walk more, but it's still painful. My bg has gone up - daily exercise had lowered it considerably - & I feel like crap. Hopefully the MRI will show that something can be done. Or at least what kind of exercise won't make things worse.

obesity is a symptom of non-nutritional optimal eating. simple as that.
obesity can be controlled easily by no carbs/sugar/whatever you deside to call 'sugar' point blank.

One does not need exercise.
As one gets healthier on no sugar does one want and can move more. More thru exericse (loose term here) and do physical things that will to fit their lifestyle. Like lifting then do it and enjoy this activity, love hiking then do it to how you want, up the mt. or a casual stroll thru a park hike, kayak more in the water,--- yes you have the energy to move as you want.

it is 1000% about the sugar in your body and how sugar destroys the physical body.

If this was in response to my post, exercise does make a difference in bg readings of diabetics - & I'm diabetic.

no, response wasn't geared at you per se......but

nope. sorry but it is the carbs you are ingesting that gives your BS numbers a change.

does exercise help a body, obviously yes but it will not and never control your bs numbers. It is 100% about what you eat in a given day.
(diff in type 1 vs. type 2 of course -- there along with each person's personal med history and way more involved) but basic truth, carbs in blood stream means blood sugar swings. No sugar, no wild swings. Meat and any other zero carb type food will increase as does any food you eat will effect BS as ingested, BS but it will never give a swing of super HI or super low if no sugar is involved. It will be 'constant stable BS' in one's life if we are talking basic type 2 and can be applied easily into type 1 (with other circumstances not included as per indiv. and so much other med history etc)

Carbs may be the primary driver of blood glucose levels but exercise can also effect them. Here is what Dr Bernstein said in answer to a question:



Jean