Ahwatukee StrengthLab Personal Training 480-612-7726

Vegetables (and fruits to a lesser degree) are a richer source of vitamins, minerals, essential fatty acids and fiber than any other category of food. Animal tissue (or meat from the muscles of animals) contain far fewer vitamins and minerals, less essential fatty acids, high levels of saturated fat and cholesterol and contain zero health enhancing fiber (soluble or insoluble).

Clearly, there’s a direct correlation and similarity between physical training executed in practice and the physical objectives desired, but what’s nearly ALWAYS ignored by coaches, trainers, teachers and parents alike, is there’s a direct correlation and similarity between mental training executed in practice and the physical objectives as well. One discipline does not supersede the other…

Book Description:

With over 35 years experience in the ring, on the mat and in the street, Loren Christensen understands the daily challenges faced by martial artists. In this book he has put together a collection of over 400 tips, drills, principles, concepts and exercises to give you the edge no matter what style of martial art you practice. Discover quick and innovative ways to improve your punching, kicking, sparring and self-defence skills plus dozens of tips to work those hard to improve areas like speed, power and flexibility. If you are feeling stuck or bored in your martial arts routine, Loren’s down-to-earth, in-your-face-style will get you up and training with a fire you have not felt in years. With hundreds of training methods drawn from his vast experience, research and interviews with top instructors around the country, Loren has put together an essential reference for every martial arts student and instructor.

http://www.amazon.com/Fighters-Fact-Book-Concepts-Principles/dp/1880336375/ref=sr_1_sc_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1391106887&sr=8-1-spell&keywords=Fighets+fact+book

It’s far more rewarding, and a better use of our time, for us to work on our personal shortcomings, rather than spend time pointing out the shortcomings of others.

Controlling our thoughts and being mindful is a continual process. It’s not a mission in which we achieve our target and then move on to another personal ambition. The day we decide that we no longer have to be aware of our thoughts is the day we start to regress or deteriorate. Our thoughts are the very essence of our lives, what we think about and how we perceive things is our personal reality. What we think, we will soon become…

There are more important things in life than pursuing financial gain and base personal desires; possessing good character is one of them.

Good character is an accumulation of good thoughts, good decisions and good actions over a lifetime; and it’s never too late to improve upon these qualities if our character comes up wanting.

Ageless Wisdom for the Modern Warrior

Book Description:

Character! Honor! Integrity! Are these traits that guide your life and your actions? Warrior Wisdom: Ageless Wisdom for the Modern Warrior focuses on how to live your life with character, honor, and integrity. This book is filled with enlightening quotes and insightful commentaries that will change your life.

This highly acclaimed book has won multiple awards and is endorsed by some of the biggest names in both the martial arts world and the world of self-help. It won a 1st place award in the Indie Excellence Book Awards in 2010, and has been honored by four martial arts hall of fame organizations for its contributions to the world of martial arts.

Warrior Wisdom guides the reader in how to live a quality life, one that is driven by character, honor, and integrity. It contains wisdom from throughout the world and across the ages, and applies this wisdom to modern-day life. The Warrior Wisdom Series was voted Best Martial Arts Series of the Year by the International Independent Martial Artist Association in 2010.

If you desire to live a life of excellence, this book can change your life. It is not merely for martial artist, but for anyone who seeks to live life to the fullest. Learn the essential traits of living a quality life in this entertaining and powerful book.

http://www.amazon.com/Warrior-Wisdom-Ageless-Modern-Updated/dp/1937884007/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1388891820&sr=8-1&keywords=warrior+wisdom

Superior people, aren’t better than average, because they have more money, come from an exclusive bloodline, possess above average beauty or have an elite education, rather superior people are better than average because they live with integrity, honor, virtue, courage, benevolence, discipline and restraint. In other words, superior people live their lives in a superior way… that’s what makes them superior.

Children who are the least aggressive in nature, but are exposed to violent mass media, are more likely to get into fights, altercations and trouble than children who are very aggressive but avoid this kind of toxic exposure.

Anyone who still believes that violent video games, movies and television have no negative effect on our children or even many adults for that matter, are simply misinformed or totally uninformed.

The entertainment value and escapism associated with mass media, such as the vast majority of movies and video games in our culture today, is a grand waste of time; we should be concerning ourselves with enlightenment, not meaningless entertainment.

It’s fairly easy to judge a man or woman accurately by simply knowing the standard of entertainment they enjoy and the amount of it.

Food has a natural calming effect on us physiologically, which is one of the primary reasons many of us overeat as a coping strategy; cutting through the psychological layers is important in order to gain control of our eating. We can work on that here.

Living A Life of Excellence

Modern Bushido is all about living a life of excellence. In this enlightening prose, Dr. Bohdi Sanders covers 30 essential traits that will change your life. Modern Bushido expands on the standards and principles needed to live a life of excellence and applies these traits directly to life in today’s world.

Readers will be motivated and inspired by the straightforward lessons and wisdom in this exceptionally unique book. If you want to live a life of excellence, this book is for you. This is a guidebook to living life to the fullest, with the character that defines the true human being. The advice discussed in Modern Bushido is sure to benefit your life in a positive way and lead you to a deeper understanding of what it means to live a successful life of honor and integrity.

In Modern Bushido, you will learn:
*  How to live a life of character
*  How your thoughts affect your life
*  What it means to be a true friend
*  The true meaning of honor
*  The benefits of meditation
*  What true respect means
*  Your ultimate responsibility in life
*  How to balance your life
*  How to be at peace the death
*  What true courage is
*  And much, much more…

Modern Bushido is a must read for every martial artist and anyone who seeks to live life as it was meant to be lived – with honor, character and integrity.

Lauran Neergaard – The Associated Press

There’s more disappointing news about multivitamins: Two  major studies found popping the pills didn’t protect aging men’s brains or help  heart attack survivors.

Millions of Americans spend billions of dollars  on vitamin combinations, presumably to boost their health and fill gaps in their  diets. But while people who don’t eat enough of certain nutrients may be urged  to get them in pill form, the government doesn’t recommend routine vitamin  supplementation as a way to prevent chronic diseases.

The studies  released Monday are the latest to test if multivitamins might go that extra step  and concluded they don’t.

“Evidence is sufficient to advise against  routine supplementation,” said a sharply worded editorial that accompanied  Monday’s findings in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine.

After all,  most people who buy multivitamins and other supplements are generally healthy,  said journal deputy editor Dr. Cynthia Mulrow. Even junk foods often are  fortified with vitamins, while the main nutrition problem in the U.S. is too  much fat and calories, she added.

But other researchers say the jury’s  still out, especially for the country’s most commonly used dietary supplement —  multivitamins that are taken by about a third of U.S. adults, and even more by  people over the age of 50.

Indeed, the U.S. Preventive Services Task  Force is deliberating whether vitamin supplements make any difference in the  average person’s risk of heart disease or cancer. In a draft proposal last  month, the government advisory group said for standard multivitamins and certain  other nutrients, there’s not enough evidence to tell. (It did caution that two  single supplements, beta-carotene and vitamin E, didn’t work). A final decision  is expected next year.

“For better or for worse, supplementation’s not  going to go away,” said Dr. Howard Sesso of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in  Boston. He helps lead a large multivitamin study that has had mixed results —  suggesting small benefits for some health conditions but not others — and says  more research is needed, especially among the less healthy.

Still,  “there’s no substitute for preaching a healthy diet and good behaviors” such as  exercise, Sesso cautioned.

As scientists debate, here are some questions  and answers to consider in the vitamin aisle:

Q: Why the new focus on  multivitamins?

A: Multivitamins have grown more popular in recent years  as research showed that taking high doses of single supplements could be risky,  such as beta-carotene.

Multivitamins typically contain no more than 100  percent of the daily recommended amount of various nutrients. They’re marketed  as sort of a safety net for nutrition gaps; the industry’s Council for  Responsible Nutrition says they’re taken largely for general wellness.

Q: What are the latest findings?

A: With Alzheimer’s on the rise  as the population ages, Harvard researchers wondered if long-term multivitamin  use might help keep older brains agile. They examined a subset of nearly 6,000  male doctors, age 65 or older, who were part of a larger study. The men were  given either multivitamins or dummy pills, without knowing which they were  taking.

After a decade of pill use, the vitamin-takers fared no better  on memory or other cognitive tests, Sesso’s team reported Monday in the journal  Annals of Internal Medicine.

Q: Did that Harvard study find any other  benefit from multivitamins?

A: The results of the Physicians Health  Study II have been mixed. Overall it enrolled about 15,000 health male doctors  age 50 and older, and the vitamin-takers had a slightly lower risk of cancer — 8  percent. Diet and exercise are more protective. They also had a similarly lower  risk of developing cataracts, common to aging eyes. But the vitamins had no  effect the risk for heart disease or another eye condition, Sesso said.

Q: Might vitamins have a different effect on people who already have  heart disease?

A: As part of a broader treatment study, a separate  research team asked that question. They examined 1,700 heart attack survivors,  mostly men, who were given either a special multivitamin containing  higher-than-usual doses of 28 ingredients or dummy pills. But the vitamins  didn’t reduce the chances of another heart attack, other cardiovascular  problems, or death.

NBC News Contributor: Linda Carroll

If you’re overweight or obese, it may pay off to shed even just a few extra pounds.

Excess weight can knock years off your life even if your cholesterol, blood pressure and blood sugar are in the healthy range, a new study suggests.

Scrutinizing the combined data from eight earlier studies, Canadian researchers have concluded that there is no such thing as “healthy obesity,” according to a report published in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

Just having good metabolic numbers doesn’t protect you from fat’s deleterious effects, said study co-author Dr. Bernard Zinman, a professor of medicine at the University of Toronto and director of the diabetes center at the Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto.

Some health professionals have “coined the term ‘healthy obesity,’” Zinman said. “When we performed a systematic review of studies that followed people for more than 10 years, indeed, even in those who were metabolically pristine, there was still an increased risk of cardiovascular death and heart attack. Healthy obesity is a myth.”

To take a closer look at how excess pounds affect heart health, Zinman and his colleagues combed through the scientific literature searching for studies that looked not only at life expectancy and body mass index, but also at metabolic measurements such as blood sugar, blood pressure and cholesterol. They chose to focus in on eight studies that when combined included information from a total of 61,386 volunteers. Four of the studies included in the researchers’ meta-analysis had follow-ups of more than 10 years.

When Zinman and his colleagues looked only at data from studies with long-term follow-up and focused just on individuals who were “metabolically healthy,” they found that obesity raised the risk of death, heart attack, and stroke by 24 percent. Similarly, they found that people who were metabolically healthy but overweight had a 21 percent increased risk, but that finding was not statistically significant.

By the same token, people who were “metabolically unhealthy,” had a higher risk of death, heart attack and stroke, whether they were fat or thin.

The report seems to contradict a study published earlier this year, which had concluded that overweight individuals might actually be healthier than those with normal weights.

But the differing results may simply be due to the fact that the new report looked at different data and at long-term outcomes, experts said. Conclusions can be skewed when young, muscled up men are included because even though they have little body fat, they will have a high BMI, said Dr. David Heber, a professor of medicine and director of the Center for Human Nutrition at the University of California, Los Angeles. And most studies are using BMI as a proxy for body fat.

The conclusions of the new study fall in line with other research that’s shown that fat, in and of itself, is a risk factor for heart disease, Heber said.

The new study shows that we can’t be complacent about our weight, said NBC News health and diet editor Madelyn Fernstrom. Still, a population study like this one can’t predict an individual’s risk, Fernstrom added.

The only way to know how worried you should be about your weight is to have “a frank discussion with your doctor,” Fernstrom said. Mitigating factors could include your family history and fitness, she added.

People who might be jolted into action by the new study should realize that even small changes in lifestyle can result in big differences, experts said.

You don’t need to be pencil thin, said Dr. Rexford Ahima, a professor of medicine and director of the obesity unit at the Institute for Diabetes, Obesity and Metabolism at the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center.

“There is such a thing as healthy weight,” Ahima said. “But it’s not going back to where you were in high school. If you’re overweight or obese, you should aim to be 5 to 10 percent less than you are today. Many studies have shown that a 5 to 10 percent weight reduction can impart benefit.”

And for those who have trouble losing weight, improved fitness may be the key to healthier living, said Dr. Vicki March, medical director of the Healthy Lifestyle Program at Magee-Womens Hospital of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and co-director of BodyChangers, also at Magee.

“You’re not doomed if you don’t lose weight,” March said. “In this study, they didn’t take exercise and other habits into consideration. We’ve known for a long time that someone who is physically fit is healthier than someone who is not, no matter what weight they are.”

Even people who are obese can find ways to exercise and can become fitter, March said. “People who have high BMIs can ride bikes or swim,” she added.

The Psychology and Physiology of Deadly Conflict in War and in Peace

Book Description:

http://www.amazon.com/Combat-Psychology-Physiology-Deadly-Conflict/dp/0964920549/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1385487989&sr=8-1&keywords=on+combat

The majority of people, the world over, confuse confidence for competence in others, and especially in themselves. It’s rather easy to instill confidence, but there’s a price to pay for competence and most aren’t willing to pay it.

NBC News

An apple a day may keep the doctor away, but if you want to live longer, a handful of nuts may be a better bet, researchers reported Wednesday.

The biggest study yet into whether nuts can add years to your life shows that people who ate nuts every day were 20 percent less likely to die from heart disease, cancer or any other cause over 30 years than people who didn’t eat them.

And not only that, nuts seem to help keep the pounds off, the team at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and the Harvard School of Public Health found.

“The most obvious benefit was a reduction of 29 percent in deaths from heart disease — the major killer of people in America,” said Dr. Charles Fuchs of Dana-Farber, who led the team. “But we also saw a significant reduction — 11 percent — in the risk of dying from cancer.”

Even peanuts, which technically aren’t nuts but legumes, helped. “We don’t see any difference in the benefits between peanuts and tree nuts,” Fuchs said.

The study, reported in the New England Journal of Medicine, is a follow-up to many different, smaller studies that have found all sorts of benefits from eating nuts. In 2003, on the basis of those findings, the Food and Drug Administration concluded that for most nuts, eating 43 grams a day, or about 1.5 ounces, as part of a low-fat diet, may reduce the risk of heart disease, Fuchs and colleagues wrote.

Studies have found that people who eat nuts have all sorts of biological benefits: less inflammation, which is linked to heart disease and cancer; less fat packed around the internal organs; better blood sugar levels; lower blood pressure — and even fewer gallstones.

In May, researchers reported that people already eating a healthy diet who added nuts or olive oil to their diets were less likely to suffer memory loss and in February scientists reported that they cut the risk of heart attacks and strokes by 30 percent.

Both reports were based on a randomized study, in which people were assigned to eat extra nuts and olive oil. These “randomized” studies are considered more powerful, because people don’t choose which diet to adopt, so other outside factors don’t interfere with the results. For instance, people who choose to eat nuts might also dislike meat, or they might like sweets, or they might exercise more or less than people who don’t think much about eating nuts.

But no large study has looked at whether these benefits translate to a longer life.

So Fuchs’ team looked at two big studies — the 120,000-person Nurses’ Health Study, which has been watching volunteers since 1976, and the Health Professionals Follow-up Study, involving more than 50,000 men and dating back to 1986.

They’re so-called observational studies — they cannot prove cause and effect. But they also were done in real-time — people were interviewed over the years, so they’re more likely to really show what was happening.

People were asked every few years how often they had eaten a serving of nuts: never or almost never, one to three times a month, once a week, two to four times a week, five or six times a week, once a day, two or three times a day, four to six times a day, or more than six times a day.

They threw out smokers and the obese and took into account weight, other aspects of diet and salt intake.

People who ate nuts seven or more times per week had a 20 percent lower death rate, the researchers found.

“In all these analyses, the more nuts people ate, the less likely they were to die over the 30-year follow-up period,” said Dr. Ying Bao of Brigham and Women’s Hospital.  Just eating nuts every once in a while lowered the death rate by 7 percent over 30 years. Eating nuts once a week lowered the death rate 11 percent, while people who ate nuts five to six times a week had a 15 percent lower death rate.

“As compared with participants who consumed nuts less frequently, those who consumed nuts more frequently were leaner, less likely to smoke, more likely to exercise, and more likely to use multivitamin supplements; they also consumed more fruits and vegetables and drank more alcohol,” Fuchs and colleagues wrote.

It’s not clear what it is about the nuts that helps, says Fuchs. “We are really looking to understand what are the bioactive compounds in nuts,” he says. It might be that nuts replace unhealthy snacks in the diet, but he thinks something more is going on — perhaps an effect on inflammation or metabolism.

And people who ate nuts gained less weight over time than people who didn’t.

“Eating nuts and gaining weight don’t always go together. It’s a matter of portion control and moderation,” said NBC News  Health and Diet Editor Madelyn Fernstrom.

“As a good source of protein, heart-healthy fat, vitamins, minerals, fiber, and several antioxidants nuts are one of nature’s nutrient-rich foods,” Fernstrom said. “But stick to a handful. More than that daily might pack on the pounds.”

The study was paid for by the National Institutes of Health and the International Tree Nut Council Nutrition Research & Education Foundation, but the Council had no say in how the study was done or how its results were eventually reported.

Fuchs says he’s changed his eating habits because of the findings. “As a matter of fact, I went to a movie theater last month and my wife got popcorn and I got almonds,” he says. “She asked me, ‘Did you do that because of the study?’ and I said, ‘Yes.'”

In nearly every example of client I have worked with in the last twenty years, the majority believe their body is where the improvement needs to take place; this is generally flat wrong.

It’s our minds that require improvement and the body will follow.

The goal is to remove all medications from our lives whenever possible; I have found many of us rely on medications believing them to be necessary when they are not.

It’s not the doctor or the medical establishment that does the healing in many cases when things go south within our bodies. In fact, we frequently recover from illnesses without any clear understanding or indication as to how or why; our bodies have their own internal wisdom at work here. We simply provide the tools: sound nutrition from clean water, fresh vegetables, fruit, lean proteins and whole grains; progressive, consistent exercise; adequate, uninterrupted sleep, as well as intermittent mental relaxation and the body will work its convoluted magic for us.

In survey after survey, the primary reason cited for not exercising, is lack of free of time – there’s simply not enough of it. However, surveys consistently find that those who do exercise regularly are just as busy as those who don’t. So, it’s really not a question of free time at all, that’s just an another excuse. It’s really a question of priority… we either take the time to exercise or we don’t.

The dietary fiber that we consume, and frequently too little of, is exclusively found in plant-based food and it’s typically undigestable; although it can be added to low-quality, processed foods to give the appearance of healthfulness. Fiber comes in countless variations within the cell-walls of plants (and the fruits and vegetables) it may bear. Dietary fiber should not be consumed through man-made purchased supplements, rather through whole foods designed by nature. Human engineering can’t rival the quality or the complexity of fiber found in it’s most natural state or it’s perfect delivery system. Moreover, whole foods (vegetables, fruits and grains) containing dietary fiber include numerous components that work to keep us healthy and their fiber create a sense of fullness that comes on us quicker and lasts longer compared to processed foods. Lastly, fiber works to clean the digestive system as it winds its way through the process, as well as absorbs unwanted products found within our digestive system as it speeds the process of digestion along.

This book stands alone as an introduction to the context of self-defense. There are seven elements that must be addressed to bring self-defense training to something approaching ‘complete.’ Any training that dismisses any of these areas leaves you vulnerable.

1. Legal and ethical implications. A student learning self-defense must learn force law. Otherwise it is possible to train to go to prison. Side by side with the legal rules, every student must explore his or her own ethical limitations. Most do not really know where this ethical line lies within them.

2. Violence dynamics. Self-defense must teach how attacks happen. Students must be able to recognize an attack before it happens and know what kind they are facing.

3. Avoidance. Students need to learn and practice not fighting. Learning includes escape and evasion, verbal de-escalation, and also pure-not-be there avoidance.

4. Counter-ambush. If the student didn’t see the precursors or couldn’t successfully avoid the encounter he or she will need a handful of actions trained to reflex level for a sudden violent attack.

5. Breaking the freeze. Freezing is almost universal in a sudden attack. Students must learn to recognize a freeze and break out of one.

6. The fight itself. Most martial arts and self-defense instructors concentrate their time right here. What is taught just needs to be in line with how violence happens in the world.

7. The aftermath. There are potential legal, psychological, and medical effects of engaging in violence no matter how justified. Advanced preparation is critical.

Any teacher or student of self-defense, anyone interested in self-defense, and any person who desires a deeper understanding of violence needs to read this book.

http://www.amazon.com/Facing-Violence-Unexpected-Rory-Miller/dp/1594392137

“The great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances, as though they were realties, and are often more influenced by the things that seem than by those that are.” Niccolo Machiavell

The Economist Sep 14th 2013

How the bacteria in your gut may be shaping your waistline

A CALORIE is a calorie. Eat too many and spend too few, and you will become obese and sickly. This is the conventional wisdom. But increasingly, it looks too simplistic. All calories do not seem to be created equal, and the way the body processes the same calories may vary dramatically from one person to the next.

This is the intriguing suggestion from the latest research into metabolic syndrome, the nasty clique that includes high blood pressure, high blood sugar, unbalanced cholesterol and, of course, obesity. This uniquely modern scourge has swept across America, where obesity rates are notoriously high. But it is also doing damage from Mexico to South Africa and India, raising levels of disease and pushing up health costs.

Metabolic syndrome can still be blamed on eating too much and exercising too little. But it is crucial to understand why some foods are particularly harmful and why some people gain more weight than others. Thankfully, researchers are beginning to offer explanations in a series of recent papers.

One debate concerns the villainy of glucose, which is found in starches, and fructose, found in fruits, table sugar and, not surprisingly, high-fructose corn syrup. Diets with a high “glycaemic index”, raising glucose levels in the blood, seem to promote metabolic problems. David Ludwig of Boston Children’s Hospital has shown that those on a diet with a low glycaemic index experience metabolic changes that help them keep weight off, compared with those fed a low-fat diet. This challenges the notion that a calorie is a calorie. Others, however, blame fructose, which seems to promote obesity and insulin resistance. Now a study published in Nature Communications by Richard Johnson, of the University of Colorado, explains that glucose may do its harm, in part, through its conversion to fructose.

Dr Johnson and his colleagues administered a diet of water and glucose to three types of mice. One group acted as a control and two others lacked enzymes that help the body process fructose. The normal mice developed a fatty liver and became resistant to insulin. The others were protected. The body’s conversion of glucose to fructose, therefore, seems to help spur metabolic woes.

You are what you eat, maybe

Even more intriguing is the notion that the same diet may be treated differently by different people. Four recent papers explored this theme. In one, published in Science in July, Joseph Majzoub, also of Boston Children’s Hospital, deleted in mice a gene called Mrap2. Dr Majzoub and his colleagues showed that this helps to control appetite. Surprisingly, however, even when the mutant critters ate the same as normal mice, they still gained more weight. Why that is remains unclear, but it may be through Mrap2’s effect on another gene, called Mc4r, which is known to be involved in weight gain.

The second and third papers, published as a pair in Nature in August, looked at another way that different bodies metabolise the same diet. Both studies were overseen by Dusko Ehrlich of the National Institute of Agricultural Research in France. One examined bacteria in nearly 300 Danish participants and found those with more diverse microbiota in their gut showed fewer signs of metabolic syndrome, including obesity and insulin resistance. The other study put 49 overweight participants on a high-fibre diet. Those who began with fewer bacterial species saw an increase in bacterial diversity and an improvement in metabolic indicators. This was not the case for those who already had a diverse microbiome, even when fed the same diet.

Jeffrey Gordon, of Washington University in St Louis, says these two studies point to the importance of what he calls “job vacancies” in the microbiota of the obese. Fed the proper diet, a person with more vacancies may see the jobs filled by helpful bacteria. In the fourth paper, by Dr Gordon and recently published in Science, he explores this in mice. To control for the effects of genetics, Dr Gordon found four pairs of human twins, with one twin obese and the other lean. He collected their stool, then transferred the twins’ bacteria to sets of mice. Fed an identical diet, the mice with bacteria from an obese twin became obese, whereas mice with bacteria from a thin twin remained lean.

Dr Gordon then tested what would happen when mice with different bacteria were housed together—mouse droppings help to transfer bacteria. Bacteria from the lean mice made their way to the mice with the obese twin’s bacteria, preventing those mice from gaining weight and developing other metabolic abnormalities. But the phenomenon did not work in reverse, probably due to Dr Gordon’s theory on the microbiota’s job vacancies. Interestingly, the invasion did not occur, and obesity was not prevented, when the mice ate a diet high in fat and low in fruits and vegetables. The transfer of helpful bacteria therefore seems to depend on diet.

Dr Gordon hopes to be able to identify specific bacteria that might, eventually, be isolated and used as a treatment for obesity. For now, however, he and other researchers are exposing a complex interplay of factors.

One type of calorie may be metabolised differently than another. But the effect of a particular diet depends on a person’s genes and bacteria. And that person’s bacteria are determined in part by his diet. Metabolic syndrome, it seems, hinges on an intricate relationship between food, bacteria and genetics. Understand it, and researchers will illuminate one of modernity’s most common ailments.

People suffering from depression may be aging  faster than other people, according to a new study from the Netherlands.

In the study of about 1,900 people who had major depressive disorders at  some point during their lives, along with 500 people who had not had depression,  researchers measured the length of cell structures called telomeres, which are  “caps” at the end of chromosomes that protect the DNA during cell division.  Normally, telomeres shorten slightly each time cells divide, and their length is  thought to be an index of a cell’s  aging.

The researchers found telomeres were shorter in people who  had experienced depression compared with people in the control group. This  suggests cellular aging in people with depression is accelerated by several  years, the researchers said.

The severity of a person’s depression,  as well as a longer duration of symptoms were linked with shorter telomere  length, and the results held after controlling for weight, smoking, drinking and  several other factors that may contribute to aging, according to the study  published today in the journal Molecular Psychiatry.

“Psychological distress, as experienced by depressed persons, has a  large, detrimental impact on the ‘wear and tear’ of a person’s body, resulting  in accelerated biological aging,” said study author Josine Verhoeven, a  researcher at the Free University in Amsterdam.

NBC News Health 11-12-13

“The findings might  help explain the variety of health complaints often experienced by people with  major depression,” Verhoeven said.

Studies have shown that people with depression  are at increased risk for diseases that tend to come with aging — for example,  dementia, cancer and type 2 diabetes — even when health and lifestyle factors  are taken into account. This has raised the question whether depression  accelerates aging.

The length  of telomeres is measured in terms of their number of DNA building blocks,  called base pairs (bp). In the study, the telomeres in healthy people were about  5,540 bp long on average, whereas people with depression had telomeres about  5,460 bp long.

The study participants ranged in age from 18 to 65. In  line with previous studies, the researchers found that with each year of age,  telomeres shortened by 14 bp, on average.

The researchers showed an  association, but not a cause-and-effect relationship between depression and  shorter telomeres. It is possible that some other factor, such as a genetic  vulnerability, underlies both, the researchers said.

It is also possible  that telomere shortening is a consequence of impairment in the body’s stress  system.

“An important question remains whether this aging process can be  reversed,” the researchers said in their study. An enzyme called telomerase  elongates telomeres by adding nucleotides to the end of chromosomes, and its  possible that lifestyle changes could increase  the activity of telomerase, thereby lengthening telomeres, Verhoeven said.

“A healthy lifestyle, such as enough physical exercise, not smoking and  a healthy diet, might be of even greater importance in depressed individuals  than it is in the non-depressed,” she said.

Melissa Dahl NBC Today Health:

Myth 1: If you’re allergic to cats or dogs, it’s best to stick with hypoallergenic breeds.

Actually, there is no such thing as a hypoallergenic pet, Stukus says, because “every single pet will secrete allergens.” And it doesn’t make much of a difference if the pet has short or long hair, because the dander that people are allergic to doesn’t come from the fur – it comes from the animal’s saliva, sweat glands and urine. Even expensive, genetically engineered pets still secrete minor allergens, Stukus said.

OK, but what if you’re an animal lover who also happens to be allergic to pet dander? Stukus often gets that question. “The best response to that is even people with pet allergies, they may be fine around certain breeds and not around others,” Stukus says. The only way to figure that out, though, is to hang around different breeds and note how your body reacts. (Stukus tells his patients to “literally rub your face on the animal.”)

Myth 2: No bread for me; I’m allergic to gluten!

Two words these days that make any allergist sigh: gluten allergy.

“Gluten has been blamed for all that ails humanity,” Stukus says. But there are only three disorders you can attribute to gluten on a scientific basis, he says: celiac disease, wheat allergies and non-celiac gluten sensitivity.

“Then there’s this claim about ‘gluten allergy,’ which really doesn’t exist,” Stukus says. “It’s not really a recognized allergy. Wheat is a recognized allergy — but a lot of people will misinterpret that as gluten.”

Myth 3: Black mold can cause some truly terrifying diseases.

Google “black mold” and you’ll find websites linking it to some frightening maladies – things like seizures, fibromyalgia, bipolar disorder, cancer.

“This has been attributed to cause all kinds of ailments,” Stukus says. “But there is absolutely no scientific link of a causal disorder to black mold to any of these disorders.”

But the most black mold can do to you is cause allergic rhinitis and asthma symptoms — if, that is, you’re allergic to mold in the first place.

Myth 4: If you have an egg allergy, you should never get a flu shot.

This is a hot topic right now, Stukus says, as it is every flu season. Allergists understand the confusion: Egg embryos from chickens are indeed used to grow viruses in the production of several vaccines, like influenza, rabies, yellow fever and MMR. So these vaccines may indeed include tiny bits of egg protein, which sounds worrisome to someone with an egg allergy (or the parent of a kid with an egg allergy).

But unless people have a history of a severe reaction called anaphylaxis in response to eating eggs, flu shots are safe for people with egg allergies. Even in people who have severe allergic reactions to egg, the vaccine is still likely to be safe, but a referral to an allergist is recommended before getting a flu shot. (An egg-free vaccine, called Flublok, is also now available.)

As for the other major vaccinations — MMR is safe for anyone with a history of egg allergy, but rabies and yellow fever are not.

Myth 5: For little ones, the rules are these: No milk until age 1, no eggs until age 2, and no nuts until age 3.

Food allergies are a scary topic these days, especially for parents, says Dr. Stanley Fineman, who is an allergist at the Atlanta Allergy and Asthma Clinic and is past president of the ACAAI. But there is some old information that is still hanging around and causing confusion: In 2000, guidelines suggested restricting foods like milk, eggs and nuts in very early childhood.

Today, that recommendation has flipped around. There is no evidence to support avoidance of these highly allergenic foods past 4 to 6 months of age, Stukus writes in his presentation.

“In the allergy community, the stance has sort of reversed 180 degrees,” he says. “We used to think avoidance reduced allergies; now, we think early introduction leads to tolerance.”

The takeaway from all of this: Don’t believe everything you read on the Internet.

“Use the Internet for guidance, but don’t rely on it as your sole source of health information,” Stukus says. “It’s a great place to formulate questions that you can take to physicians.”

Thinking about it makes you a better person, not a worse one

The Economist Magazine Oct 5th 2013

The love of money”, St Paul memorably wrote to his protégé Timothy, “is the root of all evil.” “All” may be putting it a bit strongly, but dozens of psychological studies have indeed shown that people primed to think about money before an experiment are more likely to lie, cheat and steal during the course of that experiment.

Another well-known aphorism, ascribed to Benjamin Franklin, is “time is money”. If true, that suggests a syllogism: that the love of time is a root of evil, too. But a paper just published in Psychological Science by Francesca Gino of Harvard and Cassie Mogilner of the University of Pennsylvania suggests precisely the opposite.

In the first test they were asked to make, within three minutes, as many coherent sentences as they could out of a set of words they had been presented with. What they were not told was that each of them had been assigned to one of three groups. Some volunteers’ word sets were seeded with ones associated with money, such as “dollars”, “financing” and “spend”. Some were seeded with words associated with time (e.g., “clock”, “hours”, “moment”). And some were seeded with neither. Thus unknowingly primed, the volunteers were ready for the second test.

This was mathematical. They were given a sheet of paper with 20 matrices which each contained 12 numbers, two of which added up to ten (for example, 3.81 and 6.19). They had to write down, on a separate answer sheet, how many of these pairs they could manage to find in five minutes. They were also given a packet of money and told they could reward themselves with a dollar for each pair they discovered.

Crucially, they were not asked to show their workings on the answer sheets—and the matrix sheets, on which those workings might have appeared, carried no identifier and were ostentatiously discarded once the test was done. Nevertheless, by hiding an identification code in a sample matrix on the answer sheet, Dr. Gino and Dr. Mogilner knew which matrix sheet each candidate had been given and thus who had cheated and who had not. They found that 88% of those who had been primed with money-related words in the first test cheated, as did 67% of those given neutral words. Of those primed with time-related words, though, only 42% cheated.

Nor, despite St Paul’s aphorism, was the lure of lucre during the experiment (as opposed to the effect of thinking about it as a result of being primed) necessary as a corrupting influence. A similar trial on different participants showed that presenting the matrix as a test of intelligence also caused those primed with the idea of money to cheat more than those primed with the idea of time—though, intriguingly, that did not apply if the matrix was presented as a test of personality.

This led Dr. Gino and Dr. Mogilner to suspect that self-reflection played a part in controlling unethical behavior during the test. They therefore conducted a third test in which, for half the volunteers, there was a mirror in the cubicle they were sitting in when doing the experiment.

Volunteers primed to think about money cheated 39% of the time when a mirror was present but 67% when it was not. Those primed to think about time cheated 32% of the time in the presence of the mirror and 36% in its absence—results that are statistically indistinguishable.

Finally, a fourth experiment asked primed volunteers to fill in a questionnaire before tackling the matrix. In among “filler” questions intended to disguise what was happening this asked them to rate how they felt about self-reflective statements like, “Right now, I am thinking about who I am as a person.”

As in the previous tests, those primed with money words cheated more often than those primed with neutral words and far more often than those primed with time words. But whether someone cheated was also related to how strongly he felt about the self-reflective statements presented to him in the questionnaire.

It seems, then, that thinking about time has the opposite effect on people from thinking about money. It makes them more honest than normal, rather than less so. Moreover, the more reflective they are, the more honest they become. There must be an aphorism in that.

Bill Briggs CNBC.com Oct. 24, 2013

For men of a certain age who feel lethargic, lumpy and maybe a tad limp, it is — they are convinced — T time.

In record numbers, American guys are turning to testosterone boosters to repair their pep, revive their sex drive, even erase their erectile issues. Annual sales of the prescription hormone have more than doubled since 2008, according to IMS Health, Inc., reaching $1.6 billion last year, en route to $5 billion by 2017, some analysts predict. And that doesn’t include testosterone supplements purchased over the counter or via the mail.

“We are seeing a very dramatic increase,” in men taking testosterone supplements and drugs, said Dr. Edmund Sabanegh, chair of the urology department at the Cleveland Clinic.

But the quick medical fix many seek for nagging male ills that come as naturally as receding hairlines also can bring on side effects including blood clots and infertility.

After age 30, testosterone levels dip about 1 percent each year. As internal stores of that hormone decline, men can experience a loss of muscle mass and strength, depression, lethargy and a waning interest in sex.

“The symptoms of low testosterone are kind of what many of us feel when we get older: maybe a little decrease in energy, a little erectile problem, a little drop in libido,” Sabanegh said. “Often, those are normal” for men in their 40s, 50s or older.

“And when that’s the situation, we just talk about making lifestyle changes, taking a few pounds off, getting on a regular exercise program, improving their diets,” Sabanegh added. “Those sorts of things can, in many patients, give them the kind of effect they were hoping for in the testosterone.”

For Sabanegh to place a patient on testosterone therapy, he said the man must exhibit the saggy-draggy clinical symptoms of low testosterone. Then, a lab test must confirm that the patient’s hormone level has slumped to an abnormal number. Although that line varies by individual, typically Low T means the count is less than 300 nanograms per deciliter.

While supplements can boost a man’s energy and get his sexual enthusiasm back to normal, the problem is many men’s testosterone use isn’t monitored by a physician. Sabanegh has treated patients who show up suffering the side effects from hormone dosing. “On occasion,” he said, “…I have seen acne and elevated red blood cell counts” – which can cause blood clots. Simply stopping the medication will end those side effects.

One testosterone user who has not suffered any such symptoms is Dan Nobel, 61, a nutrition store owner in St. Louis. In fact, the only changes he has noticed, he said, are a happier lifestyle and strength improvements.

A competitive bodybuilder, Nobel routinely scrutinizes his meals and his weight, 165 pounds. Last year, he decided to try his first over-the-counter testosterone supplement, 2TX, simply because he had reached age 60. (He’s never had his testosterone count checked by a physician, he said.)

“At the gym, when I did a squat (press) or a bench press, I went up 10 pounds. My libido seemed better too. And that was just after like two days of being on it,” Nobel said. “I thought, wow, this does seem to make a difference.”

Recently, at a local bodybuilding competition, Nobel won his division – men aged 60 to 69.

Meanwhile, anti-aging clinics catering to men (and women) in that same age bracket have sprung up across the nation, with many promoting testosterone drugs to their male clients.

At Vitality Logix, a wellness center specializing in aging in New York City, founder Joshua Gizersky said the key to “successful therapy” is diagnosing the reason testosterone is low “and judiciously replacing (it) to levels consistent with a 25-year-old male.”

“Guys in their early 20s are thought to have some of the highest testosterone levels in their lifetime and commonly surpass (a count of) 800,” said Gizersky, a doctor of osteopathic medicine. Consequently, “this age is chosen as the ideal target, especially when using testosterone for age-management reasons in older men.”

That can mean prescribing enough extra testosterone to propel a man’s count from about 250 to twice or as much as four times that amount, Gizersky said.

The range for “normal” testosterone in a healthy male is 300 to 1,200 nanograms per deciliter, according to the National Institutes of Health.

In addition, users of oral (typically, over-the-counter) testosterone supplements — like the one Nobel has taken — should be wary, both doctors warned. Some over-the-counter forms of testosterone taken orally are known to cause liver damage when the supplements are metabolized, Sabanegh said.

“Most of the people working at GNCs and Vitamin Shoppes have very little education on this subject matter,” Gizersky said. “Many are high school kids or college students without any concept of what they are selling and certainly no knowledge of the human physiology involved, nor the production methods used in these products — which makes for a very dangerous situation.”

The World’s First Hamburger Made From Lab-Grown Meat Has Just Been Served

The Economist Magazine Aug 10th 2013

AS FREEBIES go, it was a disappointment. Of the hundred-odd representatives of the world’s media who crammed into a television studio in London on August 5th, none got so much as a bite of the food on offer. What they did get, though, was a taste of what may prove to be the future of eating. The meal they gathered to witness other people digest consisted of the world’s first hamburger made of meat grown from scratch in a laboratory.

What the 140-gram patty lacked in heft it made up for in price. At more than $330,000, a tab partly picked up by Google’s co-founder, Sergey Brin, it must rank among the most expensive dishes in history. After sizzling in a pan for a few minutes under the watchful eye of a chef, the burger was served to two preselected tasters—a nutrition scientist and a food writer. Their verdict, “like meat” but “not that juicy”, did not perturb Mark Post of Maastricht University, who grew the beef. In fact, Dr Post, who also savored some of his creation (and is pictured holding it), had every reason to call it “a good start”.

Besides powdered egg and breadcrumbs (for binding) and beetroot juice and saffron (to enhance color), the patty was composed entirely of cultured muscle cells. To make it, Dr Post began with stem cells taken from two live cows (a Blanc Bleu Belge and a Blonde d’Aquitaine). He multiplied these cells a trillion fold and then merged them into myotubes (in essence, artificial muscle fibers), each less than 3mm long. This done, he wrapped the myotubes around hubs of agarose, a gel-like polymer extracted from seaweed, and fed them a diet of amino acids, sugars and fats (all derived from plants) to make them big and strong.

Muscle cells’ natural tendency to contract and relax meant that the myotubes bulked themselves up into rings of muscle tissue through continual movement. When each ring had grown sufficiently (this took three months, which is, as Dr. Post points out, “faster than a cow”), he cut it free to create a strand. He used 20,000 of these strands to make the historic burger.

The result was a far cry from a Porterhouse or a fillet steak. Cultivating something like that would mean growing the cells into big three-dimensional structures—which would in turn entail delivering nutrients deep inside the tissue. To do so would require blood vessels or some artificial equivalent. A real steak would also contain fat cells, the absence of which explained the lack of juiciness. Such cells are harder to culture than muscle. Dr. Post and his team are working on both these points.

Carnivores should cheer. The world’s appetite for meat is forecast to rise by 70% by 2050. Nearly a third of the world’s ice-free land is already used to raise livestock or grow fodder for these animals. Without a radical technological shift the new demand will be hard to satisfy. Vegetarians, too, have reason to egg Dr. Post on. A single sample of stem cells could, he reckons, yield 20,000 tons of “cultured beef”. This is enough to make 175m quarter-pounders, a number that would require 440,000 cattle to be slaughtered.

In addition, animal husbandry is responsible for 18% of the world’s greenhouse-gas emissions, since cattle produce prodigious quantities of methane—a gas whose warming potential is 20 times that of carbon dioxide’s over the course of a century. Growing meat in factories would help reduce these emissions. And if home-based meat kits eventually became available, it would give a whole new meaning to the phrase “hand-reared”.

Standing Orders: Real Science Lies Behind the Fad for Standing Up at Work

The Economist Magazine – Science and Technology – Aug 10th 2013

WINSTON CHURCHILL knew it. Ernest Hemingway knew it. Leonardo da Vinci knew it. Every trendy office from Silicon Valley to Scandinavia now knows it too: there is virtue in working standing up. And not merely standing. The trendiest offices of all have treadmill desks, which encourage people to walk while working. It sounds like a fad. But it does have a basis in science.

Sloth is rampant in the rich world. A typical car-driving, television-watching cubicle slave would have to walk an extra 19km a day to match the physical-activity levels of the few remaining people who still live as hunter-gatherers. Though all organisms tend to conserve energy when possible, evidence is building up that doing it to the extent most Westerners do is bad for you—so bad that it can kill you.

That, by itself, may not surprise. Health ministries have been nagging people for decades to do more exercise. What is surprising is that prolonged periods of inactivity are bad regardless of how much time you also spend on officially approved high-impact stuff like jogging or pounding treadmills in the gym. What you need as well, the latest research suggests, is constant low-level activity. This can be so low-level that you might not think of it as activity at all. Even just standing up counts, for it invokes muscles that sitting does not.

Researchers in this field trace the history of the idea that standing up is good for you back to 1953, when a study published in the Lancet found that bus conductors, who spend their days standing, had a risk of heart attack half that of bus drivers, who spend their shifts on their backsides. But as the health benefits of exercise and vigorous physical activity began to become clear in the 1970s, says David Dunstan, a researcher at the Baker IDI Heart & Diabetes Institute in Melbourne, Australia, interest in the effects of low-intensity activity—like walking and standing—waned.

Over the past few years, however, interest has waxed again. A series of epidemiological studies, none big enough to be probative, but all pointing in the same direction, persuaded Emma Wilmot of the University of Leicester, in Britain, to carry out a meta-analysis. This is a technique that combines diverse studies in a statistically meaningful way. Dr Wilmot combined 18 of them, covering almost 800,000 people, in 2012 and concluded that those individuals who are least active in their normal daily lives are twice as likely to develop diabetes as those who are most active. She also found that the immobile are twice as likely to die from a heart attack and two-and-a-half times as likely to suffer cardiovascular disease as the most ambulatory. Crucially, all this seemed independent of the amount of vigorous, gym-style exercise that volunteers did.

Correlation is not, of course, causation. But there is other evidence suggesting inactivity really is to blame for these problems. One exhibit is the finding that sitting down and attending to a task—anything from watching television to playing video games to reading—serves to increase the amount of calories people eat without increasing the quantity that they burn. Why that should be is unclear—as is whether low-level exercise like standing would deal with the snacking.

A different set of studies suggests that simple inactivity by itself—without any distractions like TV or reading—causes harm by altering the metabolism. One experiment, in which rats were immobilized for a day (not easy; the researchers had to suspend the animals’ hind legs to keep them still) found big falls in the amount of fats called triglycerides taken up by their skeletal muscles. This meant the triglycerides were available to cause trouble elsewhere. The rats’ levels of high-density lipoprotein (HDL) fell dramatically as well. HDL is a way of packaging cholesterol, and low levels of it promote heart disease. Other studies have shown the activity of lipoprotein lipase—an enzyme that regulates levels of triglycerides and HDL—drops sharply after just a few hours of inactivity, and that sloth is accompanied by changes in the activity levels of over 100 genes.

Papers which focus on people rather than laboratory animals have found similar effects. Happily, this research also suggests the changes can be reversed by small amounts of fairly relaxed activity. A study published last year by Dr Dunstan found that breaking up prolonged periods of sitting with two minutes of walking every 20 minutes made a big difference. After feeding his volunteers a sugary meal, he discovered that people who had been walking in this way had blood-glucose levels almost 30% lower than those of people who had remained seated.

For some scientists, this combination of epidemiology, animal experiments and human trials suggests that light-to-moderate exercise—standing up, walking around and the like—is something qualitatively different from an energetic, high-intensity workout. But not everyone is convinced. Many of the human studies are small-scale. (Dr. Dunstan’s paper, for example, involved just 19 participants.) And not every study that has gone looking for the ill effects of inactivity has found them.

Still, the potential size of the problem means not everyone is prepared to wait for definitive proof. Sellers of standing desks are, naturally, jumping on the latest research findings to advertise their wares. And it is surely only a matter of time before the first law suit from a sickly cubicle slave reaches court.

The Economist, Oct 19th 2013 

 

A SIMPLE idea underpins science: “trust, but verify”. Results should always be subject to challenge from experiment. That simple but powerful idea has generated a vast body of knowledge. Since its birth in the 17th century, modern science has changed the world beyond recognition, and overwhelmingly for the better.

But success can breed complacency. Modern scientists are doing too much trusting and not enough verifying—to the detriment of the whole of science, and of humanity.

What a load of rubbish

Even when flawed research does not put people’s lives at risk—and much of it is too far from the market to do so—it squanders money and the efforts of some of the world’s best minds. The opportunity costs of stymied progress are hard to quantify, but they are likely to be vast. And they could be rising.

One reason is the competitiveness of science. In the 1950s, when modern academic research took shape after its successes in the second world war, it was still a rarefied pastime. The entire club of scientists numbered a few hundred thousand. As their ranks have swelled, to 6m-7m active researchers on the latest reckoning, scientists have lost their taste for self-policing and quality control. The obligation to “publish or perish” has come to rule over academic life. Competition for jobs is cut-throat. Full professors in America earned on average $135,000 in 2012—more than judges did. Every year six freshly minted PhDs vie for every academic post. Nowadays verification (the replication of other people’s results) does little to advance a researcher’s career. And without verification, dubious findings live on to mislead.

Careerism also encourages exaggeration and the cherry-picking of results. In order to safeguard their exclusivity, the leading journals impose high rejection rates: in excess of 90% of submitted manuscripts. The most striking findings have the greatest chance of making it onto the page. Little wonder that one in three researchers knows of a colleague who has pepped up a paper by, say, excluding inconvenient data from results “based on a gut feeling”. And as more research teams around the world work on a problem, the odds shorten that at least one will fall prey to an honest confusion between the sweet signal of a genuine discovery and a freak of the statistical noise. Such spurious correlations are often recorded in journals eager for startling papers. If they touch on drinking wine, going senile or letting children play video games, they may well command the front pages of newspapers, too.

Conversely, failures to prove a hypothesis are rarely even offered for publication, let alone accepted. “Negative results” now account for only 14% of published papers, down from 30% in 1990. Yet knowing what is false is as important to science as knowing what is true. The failure to report failures means that researchers waste money and effort exploring blind alleys already investigated by other scientists.

The hallowed process of peer review is not all it is cracked up to be, either. When a prominent medical journal ran research past other experts in the field, it found that most of the reviewers failed to spot mistakes it had deliberately inserted into papers, even after being told they were being tested.

If it’s broke, fix it

All this makes a shaky foundation for an enterprise dedicated to discovering the truth about the world. What might be done to shore it up? One priority should be for all disciplines to follow the example of those that have done most to tighten standards. A start would be getting to grips with statistics, especially in the growing number of fields that sift through untold oodles of data looking for patterns. Geneticists have done this, and turned an early torrent of specious results from genome sequencing into a trickle of truly significant ones.

Ideally, research protocols should be registered in advance and monitored in virtual notebooks. This would curb the temptation to fiddle with the experiment’s design midstream so as to make the results look more substantial than they are. (It is already meant to happen in clinical trials of drugs, but compliance is patchy.) Where possible, trial data also should be open for other researchers to inspect and test.

The most enlightened journals are already becoming less averse to humdrum papers. Some government funding agencies, including America’s National Institutes of Health, which dish out $30 billion on research each year, are working out how best to encourage replication. And growing numbers of scientists, especially young ones, understand statistics. But these trends need to go much further. Journals should allocate space for “uninteresting” work, and grant-givers should set aside money to pay for it. Peer review should be tightened—or perhaps dispensed with altogether, in favour of post-publication evaluation in the form of appended comments. That system has worked well in recent years in physics and mathematics. Lastly, policymakers should ensure that institutions using public money also respect the rules.

Science still commands enormous—if sometimes bemused—respect. But its privileged status is founded on the capacity to be right most of the time and to correct its mistakes when it gets things wrong. And it is not as if the universe is short of genuine mysteries to keep generations of scientists hard at work. The false trails laid down by shoddy research are an unforgivable barrier to understanding.

Toward the end of “The Sports Gene” (Penguin/Current), David Epstein makes his way to a remote corner of Finland to visit a man named Eero Mäntyranta. Mäntyranta lives in a small house next to a lake, among the pine and spruce trees north of the Arctic Circle. He is in his seventies. There is a statue of him in the nearby village. “Everything about him has a certain width to it,” Epstein writes. “The bulbous nose in the middle of a softly rounded face. His thick fingers, broad jaw, and a barrel chest covered by a red knit sweater with a stern-faced reindeer across the middle. He is a remarkable-looking man.” What’s most remarkable is the color of his face. It is a “shade of cardinal, mottled in places with purple,” and evocative of “the hue of the red paint that comes from this region’s iron-rich soil.”

Mäntyranta carries a rare genetic mutation. His DNA has an anomaly that causes his bone marrow to overproduce red blood cells. That accounts for the color of his skin, and also for his extraordinary career as a competitive cross-country skier. In cross-country skiing, athletes propel themselves over distances of ten and twenty miles—a physical challenge that places intense demands on the ability of their red blood cells to deliver oxygen to their muscles. Mäntyranta, by virtue of his unique physiology, had something like sixty-five per cent more red blood cells than the normal adult male. In the 1960, 1964, and 1968 Winter Olympic Games, he won a total of seven medals—three golds, two silvers, and two bronzes—and in the same period he also won two world-championship victories in the thirty-kilometre race. In the 1964 Olympics, he beat his closest competitor in the fifteen-kilometre race by forty seconds, a margin of victory, Epstein says, “never equaled in that event at the Olympics before or since.”

In “The Sports Gene,” there are countless tales like this, examples of all the ways that the greatest athletes are different from the rest of us. They respond more effectively to training. The shape of their bodies is optimized for certain kinds of athletic activities. They carry genes that put them far ahead of ordinary athletes.

Epstein tells the story of Donald Thomas, who on the seventh high jump of his life cleared 7′ 3.25″—practically a world-class height. The next year, after a grand total of eight months of training, Thomas won the world championships. How did he do it? He was blessed, among other things, with unusually long legs and a strikingly long Achilles tendon—ten and a quarter inches in length—which acted as a kind of spring, catapulting him high into the air when he planted his foot for a jump. (Kangaroos have long tendons as well, Epstein tells us, which is what gives them their special hop.)

Why do so many of the world’s best distance runners come from Kenya and Ethiopia? The answer, Epstein explains, begins with weight. A runner needs not just to be skinny but—more specifically—to have skinny calves and ankles, because every extra pound carried on your extremities costs more than a pound carried on your torso. That’s why shaving even a few ounces off a pair of running shoes can have a significant effect. Runners from the Kalenjin tribe, in Kenya—where the majority of the country’s best runners come from—turn out to be skinny in exactly this way. Epstein cites a study comparing Kalenjins with Danes; the Kalenjins were shorter and had longer legs, and their lower legs were nearly a pound lighter. That translates to eight per cent less energy consumed per kilometre. (For evidence of the peculiar Kalenjin lower leg, look up pictures of the great Kenyan miler Asbel Kiprop, a tall and elegant man who runs on what appear to be two ebony-colored pencils.) According to Epstein, there’s an evolutionary explanation for all this: hot and dry environments favor very thin, long-limbed frames, which are easy to cool, just as cold climates favor thick, squat bodies, which are better at conserving heat.

What we are watching when we watch élite sports, then, is a contest among wildly disparate groups of people, who approach the starting line with an uneven set of genetic endowments and natural advantages. There will be Donald Thomases who barely have to train, and there will be Eero Mäntyrantas, who carry around in their blood, by dumb genetic luck, the ability to finish forty seconds ahead of their competitors. Élite sports supply, as Epstein puts it, a “splendid stage for the fantastic menagerie that is human biological diversity.” The menagerie is what makes sports fascinating. But it has also burdened high-level competition with a contradiction. We want sports to be fair and we take elaborate measures to make sure that no one competitor has an advantage over any other. But how can a fantastic menagerie ever be a contest among equals?

During the First World War, the U.S. Army noticed a puzzling pattern among the young men drafted into military service. Soldiers from some parts of the country had a high incidence of goitre—a lump on their neck caused by the swelling of the thyroid gland. Thousands of recruits could not button the collar of their uniform. The average I.Q. of draftees, we now suspect, also varied according to the same pattern. Soldiers from coastal regions seemed more “normal” than soldiers from other parts of the country.

The culprit turned out to be a lack of iodine. Iodine is an essential micronutrient. Without it, the human brain does not develop normally and the thyroid begins to enlarge. And in certain parts of the United States in those years there wasn’t enough iodine in the local diet. As the economists James Feyrer, Dimitra Politi, and David Weil write, in a recent paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research:

Ocean water is rich in iodine, which is why endemic goiter is not observed in coastal areas. From the ocean, iodine is transferred to the soil by rain. This process, however, only reaches the upper layers of soil, and it can take thousands of years to complete. Heavy rainfall can cause soil erosion, in which case the iodine-rich upper layers of soil are washed away. The last glacial period had the same effect: iodine-rich soil was substituted by iodine-poor soil from crystalline rocks. This explains the prevalence of endemic goiter in regions that were marked by intense glaciation, such as Switzerland and the Great Lakes region.

After the First World War, the U.S. War Department published a report called “Defects Found in Drafted Men,” which detailed how the incidence of goitre varied from state to state, with rates forty to fifty times as high in places like Idaho, Michigan, and Montana as in coastal areas.

The story is not dissimilar from Epstein’s account of Kenyan distance runners, in whom accidents of climate and geography combine to create dramatic differences in abilities. In the early years of the twentieth century, the physiological development of American children was an example of the “fantastic menagerie that is human biological diversity.”

In this case, of course, we didn’t like the fantastic menagerie. In 1924, the Morton Salt Company, at the urging of public-health officials, began adding iodine to its salt, and initiated an advertising campaign touting its benefits. That practice has been applied successfully in many developing countries in the world: iodine supplementation has raised I.Q. scores by as much as thirteen points—an extraordinary increase. The iodized salt in your cupboard is an intervention in the natural order of things. When a student from the iodine-poor mountains of Idaho was called upon to compete against a student from iodine-rich coastal Maine, we thought of it as our moral obligation to redress their natural inequality. The reason debates over élite performance have become so contentious in recent years, however, is that in the world of sport there is little of that clarity. What if those two students were competing in a race? Should we still be able to give the naturally disadvantaged one the equivalent of iodine? We can’t decide.

Eyesight can be improved—in some cases dramatically—through laser surgery or implantable lenses. Should a promising young baseball player cursed with normal vision be allowed to get that kind of corrective surgery? In this instance, Major League Baseball says yes. Major League Baseball also permits pitchers to replace the ulnar collateral ligament in the elbow of their throwing arm with a tendon taken from a cadaver or elsewhere in the athlete’s body. Tendon-replacement surgery is similar to laser surgery: it turns the athlete into an improved version of his natural self.

But when it comes to drugs Major League Baseball—like most sports—draws the line. An athlete cannot use a drug to become an improved version of his natural self, even if the drug is used in doses that are not harmful, and is something that—like testosterone—is no more than a copy of a naturally occurring hormone, available by prescription to anyone, virtually anywhere in the world.

Baseball is in the middle of one of its periodic doping scandals, centering on one of the game’s best players, Alex Rodriguez. Rodriguez is among the most disliked players of his generation. He tried to recover from injury and extend his career through illicit means. (He has appealed his recent suspension, which was based on these allegations.) It is hard to think about Rodriguez, however, and not think about Tommy John, who, in 1974, was the first player to trade in his ulnar collateral ligament for an improved version. John used modern medicine to recover from injury and extend his career. He won a hundred and sixty-four games after his transformation, far more than he did before science intervened. He had one of the longest careers in baseball history, retiring at the age of forty-six. His bionic arm enabled him to win at least twenty games a season, the benchmark of pitching excellence. People loved Tommy John. Maybe Alex Rodriguez looks at Tommy John—and at the fact that at least a third of current major-league pitchers have had the same surgery—and is genuinely baffled about why baseball has drawn a bright moral line between the performance-enhancing products of modern endocrinology and those offered by orthopedics.

The other great doping pariah is Lance Armstrong. He apparently removed large quantities of his own blood and then re-infused himself before competition, in order to boost the number of oxygen-carrying red blood cells in his system. Armstrong wanted to be like Eero Mäntyranta. He wanted to match, through his own efforts, what some very lucky people already do naturally and legally. Before we condemn him, though, shouldn’t we have to come up with a good reason that one man is allowed to have lots of red blood cells and another man is not?

“I’ve always said you could have hooked us up to the best lie detectors on the planet and asked us if we were cheating, and we’d have passed,” Lance Armstrong’s former teammate Tyler Hamilton writes in his autobiography, “The Secret Race” (co-written with Daniel Coyle; Bantam). “Not because we were delusional—we knew we were breaking the rules—but because we didn’t think of it as cheating. It felt fair to break the rules.”

“The Secret Race” deserves to be read alongside “The Sports Gene,” because it describes the flip side of the question that Epstein explores. What if you aren’t Eero Mäntyranta?

Hamilton was a skier who came late to cycling, and he paints himself as an underdog. When he first met Armstrong—at the Tour DuPont, in Delaware—he looked around at the other professional riders and became acutely conscious that he didn’t look the part. “You can tell a rider’s fitness by the shape of his ass and the veins in his legs, and these asses were bionic, smaller and more powerful than any I’d ever seen,” he writes. The riders’ “leg veins looked like highway maps. Their arms were toothpicks. . . . They were like racehorses.” Hamilton’s trunk was oversized. His leg veins did not pop. He had a skier’s thighs. His arms were too muscled, and he pedalled with an ungainly “potato-masher stroke.”

When Hamilton joined Armstrong on the U.S. Postal Service racing team, he was forced to relearn the sport, to leave behind, as he puts it, the romantic world “where I used to climb on my bike and simply hope I had a good day.” The makeover began with his weight. When Michele Ferrari, the key Postal Service adviser, first saw Hamilton, he told him he was too fat, and in cycling terms he was. Riding a bicycle quickly is a function of the power you apply to the pedals divided by the weight you are carrying, and it’s easier to reduce the weight than to increase the power. Hamilton says he would come home from a workout, after burning thousands of calories, drink a large bottle of seltzer water, take two or three sleeping pills—and hope to sleep through dinner and, ideally, breakfast the following morning. At dinner with friends, Hamilton would take a large bite, fake a sneeze, spit the food into a napkin, and then run off to the bathroom to dispose of it. He knew that he was getting into shape, he says, when his skin got thin and papery, when it hurt to sit down on a wooden chair because his buttocks had disappeared, and when his jersey sleeve was so loose around his biceps that it flapped in the wind. At the most basic level, cycling was about physical transformation: it was about taking the body that nature had given you and forcibly changing it.

Hematocrit, the last of those variables, was the number they cared about most. It refers to the percentage of the body’s blood that is made up of oxygen-carrying red blood cells. The higher the hematocrit, the more endurance you have. (Mäntyranta had a very high hematocrit.) The paradox of endurance sports is that an athlete can never work as hard as he wants, because if he pushes himself too far his hematocrit will fall. Hamilton had a natural hematocrit of forty-two per cent—which is on the low end of normal. By the third week of the Tour de France, he would be at thirty-six per cent, which meant a six-per-cent decrease in his power—in the force he could apply to his pedals. In a sport where power differentials of a tenth of a per cent can be decisive, this “qualifies as a deal breaker.”

For the members of the Postal Service squad, the solution was to use the hormone EPO and blood transfusions to boost their hematocrits as high as they could without raising suspicion. (Before 2000, there was no test for EPO itself, so riders were not allowed to exceed a hematocrit of fifty per cent.) Then they would add maintenance doses over time, to counteract the deterioration in their hematocrit caused by races and workouts. The procedures were precise and sophisticated. Testosterone capsules were added to the mix to aid recovery. They were referred to as “red eggs.” EPO (a.k.a. erythropoietin), a naturally occurring hormone that increases the production of red blood cells, was Edgar—short for Edgar Allan Poe. During the Tour de France, and other races, bags of each rider’s blood were collected in secret locations at predetermined intervals, then surreptitiously ferried from stage to stage in refrigerated containers for strategic transfusions. The window of vulnerability after taking a drug—the interval during which doping could be detected—was called “glowtime.” Most riders who doped (and in the Armstrong era, it now appears, nearly all the top riders did) would take two thousand units of Edgar subcutaneously every couple of days, which meant they “glowed” for a dangerously long time. Armstrong and his crew practiced microdosing, taking five hundred units of Edgar nightly and injecting the drug directly into the vein, where it was dispersed much more quickly.

Link to Original Story:

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2013/09/09/130909crat_atlarge_gladwell

Maggie Fox at NBC News

A program of healthy eating, exercise and stress reduction can not only reverse some diseases — it may actually slow down the aging process at the genetic level, researchers reported Monday.

The lifestyle changes affected the telomeres — little caps on the end of the chromosomes that carry the DNA, the team at the University of California, San Francisco report.

The report, published in Lancet Oncology, is based on just a few men, and prostate cancer patients at that. But it shows surprising results: Men who switched to a vegan diet, added exercise and stress reduction had longer telomeres.

The men followed a program advocated by Dr. Dean Ornish, who has long researched the role of a very low-fat, vegetarian diet in improving health. Ornish, a professor of medicine at UCSF, worked with telomere expert Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn, who won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Medicine for her discoveries.

“Taken as a whole, this is really the first study showing that any intervention may reduce cellular aging,” Ornish told NBC News. “I think these findings are almost certainly not restricted to men with prostate cancer.”

Ornish and Blackburn’s team examined 10 prostate cancer patients who had chosen to try Ornish’s program, and compared them to 25 patients who had not. They all had early stage prostate cancer that wasn’t considered dangerous.

The program includes eating a diet high in whole foods, fruits, vegetables, unrefined grains and keeping  fat to 10 percent of calories. The average American gets more than a third of calories from fat. For the first three months, volunteers got take-home meals.

They also exercised, walking at least 30 minutes a day, six days a week, did yoga-based stretching and breathing exercises, practiced relaxation techniques and went to weekly one-hour stress-reduction group sessions. And they gave blood samples.

“We found that telomerase increased by 30 percent in just three months,” Ornish said. Telomerase is an enzyme that affects telomeres. They also looked at gene activity. “Gene expression on 500 genes changed, in every case in a beneficial way,” Ornish told NBC News.

Five years later, the team took blood samples again. The 10 men who followed the Ornish plan had significantly longer telomeres five years later — on average 10 percent longer. The 25 men who had not followed the program had shorter telomeres — 3 percent shorter on average.

“The more people changed their lifestyles, the more they improved,” Ornish said.

Ornish’s diet plan has been shown to reverse heart disease, diabetes and may help keep early prostate cancer in check.

Ornish was working with prostate cancer patients who had chosen not to get any treatment for their tumors. Only a few men had given enough blood in the study to make it possible to test their stored samples, so he thinks a larger study should now be conducted.

Ornish says the program is easy to follow. Each of the 10 men had stuck with it for five years and longer — long past the time they were enrolled in the study.

“We are getting 85 to 95 percent adherence to our program,” he said. “We are getting ridiculously high levels of adherence.”

Ornish says that’s because it’s pleasant, and comprehensive. “And most people feel so much better they change their lifestyle,” he said.

“People often think that it has to be a new drug or a new laser, something really high-tech and expensive to be powerful. What we are finding is the simple choices that we make every day are more powerful.”

No such thing as the truth? If what we believe to be true is relative, than I suppose it would be just as well to build our buildings of cardboard and our bridges of hardened candy.

Things are not relative, the truth is out there, and it’s better to work with it, than against it… we shouldn’t be lazy in our search for it.

Believe it or not, today we may be living in the most peaceful moment in our species’ existence. In his gripping and controversial new work, New York Times bestselling author Steven Pinker shows that despite the ceaseless news about war, crime, and terrorism, violence has actually been in decline over long stretches of history. Exploding myths about humankind’s inherent violence and the curse of modernity, this ambitious book continues Pinker’s exploration of the essence of human nature, mixing psychology and history to provide a remarkable picture of an increasingly enlightened world.

http://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence/dp/0143122010/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr=1-1&qid=1379127014

Nothing is more American, or human for that matter, than the desire for a shortcut; no matter what the subject matter, we simply want the results or goods now.

It’s important to remind ourselves, that most things worth having don’t come quickly, and if they happen to come quickly, they are rarely appreciated. Self-improvement requires more than a few minutes in a microwave.

As for a shortcut? It generally just makes the road even longer.

Quite simply – we need them, they help us push forward and remain in the center lane, but when we aren’t getting along well with someone, we’re most likely running into their defense mechanisms and/or they’re running into ours.

Reading for enlightenment, not entertainment, is a sure-fire way to expand our narrow perspectives and increase the depth of our thoughts.

We’re not clever enough to learn or build anything of real depth or substance alone, but by standing on the shoulders of others, encompassing many years of thought and dedication, we’re able to arrive at quality ideas, inventions and institutions.

Leading an average, quiet, undramatic – yet strong – stable life is far more rewarding for the majority of us than attempting to court publicity and headlines or seek financial gain simply for the pursuit of money; however, we do need to know who we are, with a strong sense of what’s important, for this to be the case.

How to Think About the Great Ideas: From the Great Books of Western Civilization

Time magazine called Mortimer J. Adler a “philosopher for everyman.” In this guide to considering the big questions, Adler addresses the topics all men and women ponder in the course of life, such as “What is love?”, “How do we decide the right thing to do?”, and, “What does it mean to be good?” Drawing on his extensive knowledge of Western literature, history, and philosophy, the author considers what is meant by democracy, law, emotion, language, truth, and other abstract concepts in light of more than two millennia of Western civilization and discourse. Adler’s essays offer a remarkable and contemplative distillation of the Great Ideas of Western Thought.

http://www.amazon.com/How-Think-About-Great-Ideas/dp/0812694120/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1378139486&sr=1-3&keywords=the+great+ideas+and+adler

Healthy, well balanced people realize that they”re not even remotely independent; this is a misdirected life-goal that’s not desirable or even achievable. Dependent in “meaningful” ways is an important and integral part of living well.

Childhood is certainly challenging for kids in our culture, but parents and adults who haven’t completed the work of adolescence or continue to extend their adolescence well into adulthood, make growing up more complicated for many kids.

Consequences for wise decisions made are sometimes slow to arrive, but arrive they eventually do; consequences for poor decisions made are sometimes slow to arrive as well, but arrive they eventually do. What consequences will your current decisions be bringing you?

You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You’re Deluding Yourself

http://www.amazon.com/You-Are-Not-So-Smart/dp/1592407366/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1375916051&sr=1-1&keywords=you+are+not+so+smart

In our culture “success” is certainly the grand universal goal but it’s unfortunately defined in precepts such as “more” money, more power or more status. Perhaps success could be more wisely defined in precepts such as “better” education, better relationships or better self-mastery?

Good rapport is generally found more readily when we are concerned less with expressing ourselves, and more with listening and actually hearing someone else.

Certainly the greatest stress producers in our lives are other people, so how we relate to and handle others will dictate the level of stress found in our lives; we can work on that here.

When everyday distractions and pursuits are no longer enough… life is demanding personal growth and transformation.