Take a pill, any pill...

It's called the Adherence Effect and it shows up in different drug trials all the time. It was noted almost 30 years ago in a study on a lipid lowering drug, long before the days of statins. Overall, the average 5 year mortality in the treatment and the placebo groups were almost identical, both about 20% - ie the drug itself was entirely ineffective. What they did find was that the people who actually took their pills as directed (at least 80% of the time), regardless of whether it was the drug or the placebo, had a 5 year morality of 15%. Among people who did not take the pills as directed, the 5 year mortality was 24.6%.


More recently, a study published in The Lancet, found the same thing with regard to a drug intended to reduce heart failure. Dr. Eades over at Protein Power looked at this effect with regard to a "study" on statin effectiveness. The message here is to be weary of what you hear in the media. Two things that tend to occur together are often presented as if one thing caused the other. Don't be fooled into thinking any pill or powder is your golden ticket to eternal youth. The best thing you can do for you health and longevity is to take an interest in it. As L'Oreal puts it - you're worth it!

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Follow Jocelyn's Paleo Rehab at Cavegirl In The Kitchen
Follow David at CrossFit BRIO

Labels: Health, links, Research, Science, supplements

Did you know Saskatoon has a Frisbee golf course? Have you ever even heard of Frisbee golf? It's also called disc golf or just "frolf". There is even a Professional Disc Golf Association.



One piece of advice we have is to take a picture of this sign before you start. The tee off points for each hole and the path of the course itself are not well marked. We found ourselves referring to the photo several times in order to figure out where to go next.

Labels: Caveman, Exercise, Go Outside, Sports

Did you know that when you have blood work done and your report shows a number for LDL that the lab likely did not actually measure your LDL directly? Lets go back a few steps and check this out...



First of all, there is no such thing as cholesterol floating around in your blood. It is carried around on little vehicles called a lipoproteins. The lipoproteins come in different shapes and sizes - High Density Lipoproteins (HDL), Low Density Lipoproteins (LDL), and Very Low Density Lipoproteins (VLDL). Even among those three there are many sub-categories. There are eight different types of LDL, for example. Anyway, conventional Wisdom (*shudder*) tells us that HDL is the "good cholesterol" and LDL is the "bad cholesterol", even though neither HDL nor LDL are actually cholesterol at all, they are lipoproteins! But that's a rant for another post. And actually, 50% of people who have heart disease have high LDL and 50% of people who have heart disease do not have high LDL, so that essentially negates it as a predictor of anything. But again, I digress... Back to the issue at hand...



The other thing measured in a blood lipid profile is your triglyceride level. A triglyceride is three fatty acids (hence the tri) glommed on to a glycerol molecule (the glyceride part) like a happy, rotund little family. Researchers back in the 70s figured out it was very easy to measure total cholesterol, HDL, and triglycerides, but that it was (and still is) rather difficult and therefore expensive to measure LDL or VLDL. So this Friedwald fellow and his cronies devised an equation to approximate LDL based on the other numbers. Their logic went like this:



Total Cholesterol = HDL + LDL + VLDL

Rearranging this we get...

LDL = Total - HDL - VLDL



They found that you could take the triglycerides number and divide by 5 for a reasonable guesstimate on the VLDL number. And so the Friedwald equation was born...



LDL = Total - HDL - Tri/5



The only problem was they found the VLDL estimation was useless if your triglycerides were over 400*, and therefore the LDL numbers derived based on that were totally inaccurate.



For years now and through many studies of various dietary interventions there was this weird phenomenon that a low carb diet would greatly improve all the blood lipids except LDL, which would stay the same or go up. The nay-sayers quickly pointed to the high fat dietary regime and said "SEE! It is bad for your heart. It makes your LDL go up!"



Here's the problem with that. It is now known that when Triglyceride levels are below 100*, the Friedwald equation also fails, significantly overestimating LDL numbers. Essentially the Friedwald equation punishes you for having low triglycerides, which is supposed to be a good and desirable blood quality to have. So if your doctor ever raises an eyebrow at your for an increased LDL level when your triglyceride levels are low, politely ask to have the LDL measured directly.



The awesome Dr. Mike over at Protein Power has a great post on this topic from which I have paraphrased, borrowed links, and generally plagiarized. Please visit his blog because he is much smarter than me! Tom Naughton, over at the Fat Head website, also addressed the topic of measuring cholesterol this week. I guess we all have cholesterol on the brain. Or is it cholesterol in the brain...?



*In the US, they use a different measurement for blood lipids, mg/dL. In Canada, we use the metric system which uses mmol/L. Metric is the world standard, but of course that doesn't matter in the US. American numbers are somewhere between 50 and 400 ish, where as Canadian numbers are more like 0.5-4.5 ish. To convert an American measurement to Canadian, divide by 18. To convert a Canadian measurement to American, multiply by 18. Read more about this here.

Labels: Cholesterol, Health, Heart Disease, links, Research

Labels: Kids, Safety, Videos

Grains are boring, bland, and flavorless! They only become tasty when you add sauces, spices, and spreads.

The Paleo Diet

Paleo Breakfast Recipes

Paleo food.com

At Darwin's Table

Performance Menu

Mark's Daily Apple

BRIO Recipe Posts

Time to get your Chef on!

Labels: Cavegirl in the Kitchen, Caveman, Food, Recipes

Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS) is a health problem affecting women and is the number one cause of infertility. It is far too common - affecting as many as 1 in 15 women these days. For a long time, physicians have know that the ovaries secrete excess testosterone in PCOS and that the ovaries develop many small cysts. Common symptoms include:

• Acne
• Weight gain and trouble losing weight
• Extra, thicker, darker hair on the face, chest, belly, and back
• Thinning hair on the scalp
• Irregular, absent, or heavy periods
• Infertility
• Depression

But what exactly causes the ovaries to secrete excess androgens? Insulin. Plain and simple. Yet again, our favorite hormonal scapegoat gets the blame. Doctors now know that hyperinsulinemia (too much insulin) is the underlying cause of the cascade of hormonal imbalances that occur with PCOS. The vast majority of (but not all) women with PCOS have insulin resistance, obesity, and are at an elevated risk of diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart disease. Rather than treating just the symptoms (acne, hair, abnormal periods, weight gain) one by one, some doctors now treat PCOS with insulin sensitizing diabetes medications like Metformin.

A meal high in carbohydrates causes a rush of glucose into the blood stream. Too much sugar in the blood at one time would be fatal (like alcohol) so insulin is secreted by the pancreas to deal with the influx. Insulin is largely a "storage" hormone. It picks up the sugar and transports it around the body - to the brain, to the muscles, to the organs, to the liver, and finally to the fat cells if no other part of the body needs it. Eventually the cells get desensitized to insulin and aren't able to receive the sugar anymore. It's kind of like when you're around a person wearing too much perfume - at first it's overwhelming, but eventually your smell receptors downgrade their sensitivity and you can't smell it at all anymore. When the cells are insulin resistant, blood sugar levels stay high, so the pancreas secretes even more insulin to try to clear the sugar away. It's the vicious cycle of a high carb diet: more sugar = more insulin = more insulin resistance = more insulin and on and on. Insulin is now known to be the culprit in stimulating the ovaries to produce excess male sex hormones.

The best doctors (or smartest patients) treat PCOS with simple diet and exercise, which are more effective options for increasing insulin sensitivity over prescription drugs. A low carb diet eliminates the blood sugar spikes, and therefore eliminates the need for such high levels of insulin. When insulin levels are low, the cells regain their sensitivity to it. It's like moving away from the perfume-doused person for a while. The lack of insulin allows "energy release" hormones to do their job and let the fatty acids float freely out of the fat tissue, so weight loss happens easily. An abundance of energy is available as the fat stores shrink.

Exercise, especially high intensity exercise, burns off stored carbs in the muscle tissue (called glycogen). When those stores have been depleted, the muscle cells are primed to receive blood sugar and so it is used for energy rather than locked away in the fat. This, at least partially, explains why short, fast sprints are known to be more effective for fat loss than long bouts of low intensity cardio. It also explains why high intensity programs like CrossFit work so well to keep athletes lean.

So basically, PCOS is another part of the Metabolic Syndrome, a collection of diseases only present in industrialized/westernized nations. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that when you take a species out of its natural habitat and feed it an unnatural diet it gets sick. Humans are no different than animals in the zoo. The best thing you can do to regain your vitality and avoid chronic disease is to move around like your caveman ancestors and eat like them too. Meats and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch, and no sugar. Eat things that are fresh, local, and unprocessed. Eat things that had a face and a soul, cram yourself full of green things, and enjoy the health benefits of plenty of fat.

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Follow Jocelyn's Paleo Rehab at Cavegirl In The Kitchen
Follow David at CrossFit BRIO

Labels: Caveman, CrossFit, Fat vs Carbs, Health, Insulin, physiology

You probably know by now that I love Gary Taubes and his epic tome on nutritional "science", Good Calories, Bad Calories. I want everyone to read it. But if you don't have the time or the desire or the patience to work through this detailed, heavy read then please take an hour and watch this video. It's the complete lecture he delivered to a group of physicians at Dartmouth.

Here's a recreation of one of his slides, in which he addresses the idea that the massive fatten of western society is the result of a small positive energy balance, accumulated over time.

Do we really assume that those people who are able to maintain their weight over the course of a decade or more are managing - somehow - to match their energy intake to their energy output so precisely that there is less that 11 cal/day of error? Seriously???? Don't be ridiculous! The idea that weight accumulates as the result of a small positive energy balance accumulating (or compounding) over many days, years, and decades is ludicrous. The human body has the capacity to deal with huge variations in energy intake and expenditure. Spend a tough day working in the yard? You'll be mighty hungry that night. Attempt to starve yourself for a few days? You can count on feeling lethargic and cold. Have a big cheat day? You'll feel hot and have more energy and less appetite for the next few days.

Your body is smart. A lot smarter than the idiots who try to tell you all you have to do to lose weight is cut 100 or 200 cals a day from your diet.

Labels: Fat vs Carbs, Nutrition, physiology, Research, Videos