Growth hormone may rise 300 percent with exercise: Acute increases also occur in cortisol, adrenaline, and noradrenaline

The figure below (click to enlarge) is from the outstanding book Physiology of sport and exercise, by Jack H. Wilmore, David L. Costill, and W. Larry Kenney. If you are serious about endurance or resistance exercise, or want to have a deeper understanding of exercise physiology beyond what one can get in popular exercise books, this book should be in your personal and/or institutional library. It is one of the most comprehensive textbooks on exercise physiology around. The full reference to the book is at the end of this post.The hormonal and free fatty acid responses shown on the two graphs are to relatively intense exercise combining aerobic...

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Postprandial glucose levels, HbA1c, and arterial stiffness: Compared to glucose, lipids are not even on the radar screen

Postprandial glucose levels are the levels of blood glucose after meals. In Western urban environments, the main contributors to elevated postprandial glucose are foods rich in refined carbohydrates and sugars. While postprandial glucose levels may vary somewhat erratically, they are particularly elevated in the morning after breakfast. The main reason for this is that breakfast, in Western urban environments, is typically very high in refined carbohydrates and sugars.HbA1c, or glycated hemoglobin, is a measure of average blood glucose over a period of a few months. Blood glucose glycates (i.e., sticks to) hemoglobin, a protein found in red blood...

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Oven roasted meat: Pork tenderloin

This cut of pork is the equivalent in the pig of the filet mignon in cattle. It is just as soft, and lean too. A 100 g portion of roasted pork tenderloin will have about 22 g of protein, and 6 g of fat. Most of the fat will be monounsaturated and saturated, and some polyunsaturated. The latter will contain about 450 mg of omega-6 and 15 mg of omega-3 fats in it.The saturated fat is good for you. The omega-6-to-omega-3 ratio is not a great one, but a 100 g portion will have a small absolute amount of omega-6 fats, which can be easily offset with some omega-3 from seafood or a small amount of fish oil. Pork tenderloin is easy to find in supermarkets,...

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Intermittent fasting, engineered foods, leptin, and ghrelin

Engineered foods are designed by smart people, and the goal is not usually to make you healthy; the goal is to sell as many units as possible. Some engineered foods are “fortified” with the goal of making them as healthy as possible. The problem is that food engineers are competing with many millions of years of evolution, and evolution usually leads to very complex metabolic processes. Evolved mechanisms tend to be redundant, leading to the interaction of many particles, enzymes, hormones etc.Natural foods are not designed to make you eat them nonstop. Animals do not want to be eaten (even these odd-looking birds below). Most plants do not “want”...

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Atheism is a recent Neolithic invention: Ancestral humans were spiritual people

For the sake of simplicity, this post treats “atheism” as synonymous with “non-spiritualism”. Technically, one can be spiritual and not believe in any deity or supernatural being, although this is not very common. This post argues that atheism is a recent Neolithic invention; an invention that is poorly aligned with our Paleolithic ancestry.Our Paleolithic ancestors were likely very spiritual people; at least those belonging to the Homo sapiens species. Earlier ancestors, such as the Australopithecines, may have lacked enough intelligence to be spiritual. Interestingly, often atheism is associated with high intelligence and a deep understanding...

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Cheese’s vitamin K2 content, pasteurization, and beneficial enzymes: Comments by Jack C.

The text below is all from commenter Jack C.’s notes on this post summarizing research on cheese. My additions are within “[ ]”. While the comments are there under the previous post for everyone to see, I thought that they should be in a separate post. Among other things, they provide an explanation for the findings summarized in the previous post.***During [the] cheese fermentation process the vitamin K2 (menaquinone) content of cheese is increased more than ten-fold. Vitamin K2 is anti-carcinogenic, reduces calcification of soft tissue (like arteries) and reduces bone fracture risk. So vitamin K2 in aged cheese provides major health benefits that are not present in the control nutrients. [Jack is referring to the control nutrients used in the study summarized in the previous post.]Another...

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Cheese consumption, visceral fat, and adiponectin levels

Several bacteria feed on lactose, the sugar found in milk, producing cheese for us as a byproduct of their feeding. This is why traditionally made cheese can be eaten by those who are lactose intolerant. Cheese consumption predates written history. This of course does not refer to processed cheese, frequently sold under the name “American cheese”. Technically speaking, processed cheese is not “real” cheese.One reasonably reliable way of differentiating between traditional and processed cheese varieties is to look for holes. Cheese-making bacteria produce a gas, carbon dioxide, which leaves holes in cheese. There are exceptions though, and sometimes...

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Four pounds, really? Well that's music to my ears.

"I really want a guitar", said the little man, a few months ago, in amongst his list of other things that a five year old really, really wants."Yes, yes" I said, adding it to my own mental list known as 'yeah, yeah, that's nice...mention it five more times in the next six months and I'll know that you really really - yes really really - want it'.Now guitars don't come cheap and even second hand ones on eBay can be a small fortune if they are just left to gather dust when a child's keen interest amounts to nothing more than a flavour of the month idea.  So even though a guitar has been mooted around three times already, I've been biding my...

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Intermittent fasting as a form of liberation

I have been doing a lot of reading over the years on isolated hunter-gatherer populations; see three references at the end of this post, all superb sources (Chagnon’s book on the Yanomamo, in particular, is an absolute page turner). I also take every opportunity I have to talk with anthropologists and other researchers who have had field experience with hunter-gatherer groups. Even yesterday I was talking to a researcher who spent many years living among isolated native Brazilian groups in the Amazon.Maybe I have been reading too much into those descriptions, but it seems to me that one distinctive feature of many adults in hunter-gatherer populations,...

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Is heavy physical activity a major trigger of death by sudden cardiac arrest? Not in Oregon

The idea that heavy physical activity is a main trigger of heart attacks is widespread. Often endurance running and cardio-type activities are singled out. Some people refer to this as “death by running”.Good cardiology textbooks, such as the Mayo Clinic Cardiology, tend to give us a more complex and complete picture. So do medical research articles that report on studies of heart attacks based on comprehensive surveys.Reddy and colleagues (2009) studied sudden cardiac arrest events followed by death from 2002 to 2005 in Multnomah County in Oregon. This study was part of the ongoing Oregon Sudden Unexpected Death Study. Multnomah County...

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Look who's decluttering for EACH's Treehouse appeal!

I hope BBC Radio Suffolk's James Hazell isn't planning to sell off his producer Sally Burch at the massive car boot sale they've organised  [So James, you'd better ask Sal to get off that table pretty sharpish, before someone snaps her up!]Regular listeners will already know that BBC Radio Suffolk is supporting the East Anglian Children's Hospice Treehouse Appeal, to help raise £3 million for a much needed new hospice to be built in Ipswich. Presenters have been getting up to allsorts including dragonboat racing, cycling challenges and getting into training to climb Mount Kilmanjaro.  And now, James & Sal have put their heads together...

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Swapping rubbish for compost with Dev and Dave

As Compost Awareness Week comes to an end, I thought I'd take the opportunity to partake in a spot of awareness-raising of my own ....and well...show you some of my compost.And here's a closer look....starting with the new bed I planted up this afternoon with some fantastic soil improver, courtesy of three chickens who love to poop and a compost bin called Plastic Dev that can take it!   After a year of breaking down, it's lost all its fragrance and simply looks like good quality compost, which I mixed with earth from the garden and spread onto the bed, ready to transplant some day-lilies from an overgrown part of the garden. ...

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Long distance running causes heart disease, unless it doesn’t

Regardless of type of exercise, disease markers are generally associated with intensity of exertion over time. This association follows a J-curve pattern. Do too little of it, and you have more disease; do too much, and incidence of disease goes up. There is always an optimal point, for each type of exercise and marker. A J curve is actually a U curve, with a shortened left end. The reason for the shortened left end is that, when measurements are taken, usually more measures fall on the right side of the curve than on the left.The figure below (click to enlarge) shows a schematic representation that illustrates this type of relationship. (I am...

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Niacin and its effects on growth hormone, glucagon, cortisol, blood lipids, mental disorders, and fasting glucose levels

Niacin is a very interesting vitamin. It is also known as vitamin B3, or nicotinic acid. It is an essential vitamin whose deficiency leads to a dreadful disease known as pellagra. In large doses of 1 to 3 g per day it has several effects on blood lipids, including these: it increases HDL cholesterol, decreases triglycerides, and decreases Lp(a). Given that this is essentially a reversal of the metabolic syndrome, for those who are on their way to developing it, niacin must really do something good for our body. Niacin is also a powerful antioxidant.The lipid modification effects of niacin are so consistent across a broad spectrum of the population...

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Obesity protects against disease, unless you eat butter

Notes: - This post is a joke, a weird parody of academic research, which is why it is labeled “humor” and is being filed under “Abstract humor”. In my reading of academic articles I often come across articles with a lot of problems – interpretation biases, idiotic self-citation, moronic research designs, misguided immodesty, exaggerated political correctness, fake markers of high moral standards, nonsensical quantitative analysis etc. I decided to write a short post on a fictitious study that has all of these problems (a challenge).- I apologize for this spoiler. Some people probably like humor posts better if they do not know what they are in...

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