SmarterFitter Blog Less diet, more brain

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Despite increased awareness about the benefits of health and fitness, Americans still have poor diets and the obesity rate continues to rise. According to a 2008 survey by the Trust For America’s Health, obesity rates increased significantly in 37 states since last year, and declined only in the District of Columbia.

What’s going wrong? A recent research report by the USDA points to, well, modern life as the culprit.

The report presents a “consumer demand model” which shows how long-term health goals and external factors can drive a person’s food choices. Turns out, knowledge is nothing compared to “visceral factors” like work and stress which contribute to more meals away from home, more time between meals, and in the end, more calories. Here are some of the key findings:

• Individuals are more likely to consume more calories when they extend the time between meals or consume more of their food away from home. For example, going 5 hours between meals instead of 4 adds about 52 calories for someone on a diet of 2,000 calories per day.
• Unsurprisingly, the location at which someone eats affects what and how much is consumed. People are estimated to cosume about 107 more calories when eating foods from a restaurant compared with foods prepared at home.
• People who work more hours are also more influenced by the interval between meals. At 4 hours between meals, an individual who works 40 hours a week is estimated to eat about 20 percent more calories than someone who is not employed. At 8 hours between meals, the calorie discrepancy jumps to nearly 40 percent.

There are no huge surprises here, but it serves to illustrate the challenge of modern life to anyone wanting to establish healthy habits. Work is a real problem. The obesity issue seems to reflect a need for a national shift in attitude away from work and consumption and more towards, well, fun. Why is life so stressful? Why do we have such a problem taking lunch breaks? Stopping for a snack? Packing lunch instead of eating out? Finding time to take a walk?

In my last job at a big bank, I worked with a bunch of analysts who were constantly overworked, yet unwilling to push back on their duties. One girl spoke to me about her former running habits, and how she hasn’t put on her running shoes in months and it makes her so sad, but “I must finish this report!” she said as she settled into her screen with a tray of take-away sushi, not to leave the office until 10pm.

I suppose my inability to accept tasks when I knew they would cause me to work overtime is one of the reasons I no longer work at a bank. One of my goals is to be healthy in body AND mind, and since quitting the bank and working for myself, I’ve never been happier or healthier. And when I think about the rest of the fitness bloggers I know, many of them work at home or own their own businesses - I wonder if their fitness success is connected with this kind of freedom?

Unfortunately, most of us can’t just up and quit our jobs. So then what? Who out there works the 9-5 but manages (or at least tries to manage) to work fitness into the mix? I bet there’s a lot to learn from people who manage to keep a job without turning into a stress-ball. If you’re out there, let us know how you do it!

Is Dietary Knowledge Enough? Hunger, Stress, and Other Roadblocks to Healthy Eating [thanks Rory!]

A recent Harvard study has found that 90 days of athletic training not only produces significant changes in the heart, but those changes vary with the type of exercise performed.

Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) followed two groups of Harvard University athletes: one group of endurance athletes, and another group of strength athletes. They used ultrasound technology to study the athlete’s hearts before and after the 90-day period. Both groups showed significant increases in the size of their hearts, but the locations of the increase differed:

• Endurance exercise expanded the left and right ventricles, the chambers that send blood into the aorta and to the lungs, respectively, and increased the relaxation of the heart muscle between beats.
• Strength exercise thickened the heart muscle, primarily the left ventricle, and decreased the relaxation of the heart muscle between beats.

Researchers were surprised by both the magnitude of changes over a short time period and by how great the differences were. It also raises questions about the long-term impact of exercise, especially for people with heart disease. Aaron Baggish, MD, lead author of the study, says:

While this study looks at young athletes with healthy hearts, the information it provides may someday benefit heart disease patients. The take-home message is that, just as not all heart disease is equal, not all exercise prescriptions are equal. This should start us thinking about whether we should tailor the type of exercise patients should do to their specific type of heart disease.

How Exercise Changes Structure And Function Of Heart

Thanks to Crabby for enlightening me to the latest drama around vitamins. Guess what: they might do us more harm than good.

The folks at Chochrane Systemic Review scrutinised 67 randomised trials but could “find no evidence to support taking antioxidant supplements to reduce the risk of dying earlier in healthy people or patients with various diseases.”

No wonder all that vitamin C I’ve been taking to squash my spring sniffles seems to be doing no good.

Says Chochran researcher, Goran Bjelakovic: ““The findings of our review show that if anything, people in trial groups given the antioxidants beta-carotene, vitamin A, and vitamin E showed increased rates of mortality. There was no indication that vitamin C and selenium may have positive or negative effects…The bottom line is that current evidence does not support the use of antioxidant supplements in the general healthy population or in patients with certain diseases.”

The news has sparked the expected outrage from the supplement industry, but journalists, too, are raising an eyebrow. The Times was quick to point out that studying the effect of antioxidants is incredibly hard due to our ever-changing diet patterns and unreliability as witnesses.

So what does this latest review mean for us? It certainly doesn’t mean that those of us taking multivitamins are going to suffer an early death - they were not covered in the review. For those of us who take supplements of individual antioxidants, the picture is still far from clear. What we can say is that if there are benefits in taking single antioxidant supplements, they are very small indeed.

I agree with the Guardian’s Sarah Boseley:

In the end, maybe the safest thing is just to eat a better diet.

I’m not about to give up my daily multivitamin, but it does make me think twice about all the £££’s I’ve spent on vitamin C. Next time I’ll spend my money on cauliflower and oranges, which are far more pleasant to eat than nasty pills!

No evidence that antioxidant supplements prolong life, News from the Cochrane Library
The truth about Vitamins, The Times
Hard to swallow, The Guardian

Aerobic Fitness Could Delay Aging By Up To 12 Years

Contrary to what Jane Fonda may have us believe, aerobic exercise is not defined as “that which requires a tight leotard and leg warmers. “Aerobic” is all about oxygen, and aerobic exercise is the kind that requires oxygen for energy. The sad thing about getting old is that our aerobic power starts to fall steadily once we hit middle aged. This latest study shows that regular aerobic exercise can slow the decline, and sometimes even reverse it. It just goes to show that you’re never too old to jazzercise!

Read Maintaining Aerobic Fitness Could Delay Biological Aging By Up To 12 Years

Washing Fruit and Veg Won’t Necessarily Make Them Clean

The American Chemical Society showed that water and disinfectants are no match for some bacteria that make their way into the leaves of lettuce, spinach, and other innocent fruit and vegetables. The FDA suggests irradiation. Great. Yet another synthetic process to add to the synthetic fertilisers they spray on our genetically modified food. Would you like E. Coli with that?

Read Dr. Mom Was Right — And Wrong — About Washing Fruits And Vegetables

Smile and Say Moo: Farm Animals a Key to Mental Health?

Norway’s mountainous geography may not be conducive for farmland, but that doesn’t mean farm animals don’t have their place among the downtrodden and weary. Researchers at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences asked 90 patients with various mental disorders to complete quality of life questionaires before and after a 12-week period spent on the farm. The results showed that animal-assisted-therapy with farm animals has positive effects on self-efficacy, the ability to cope, and general quality of life. “During the six months follow-up period self-efficacy was significantly better in the treatment group, but not in the control group,” the researchers say.

Read Mental Health Cultivated On The Farm

The new Speedo LZR Racer swimsuit is being hailed as the “world’s fastest swimsuit” as athletes wearing the swimsuit have broken three world records within a week of its debut.

Even if I won’t be joining the 2012 Olympic hopefuls in purchasing the £320 suit, I can’t deny that the research from Speedo’s “AQUALAB” is pretty cool. The team used computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to determine the sources of drag from the skin. According to researcher Dr. Herve Morvan, “with CFD analysis we were able to use the compressive properties of the suit to make the swimmer as hydrodynamically efficient as possible.” They also used similar simulations to train athletes, showing the effects of swim cap and finger position in performance.

This suit has 5% less drag than last year’s high performance Speedo, the FS Pro, which helped swimmers break 21 world records. Hey that’s not bad. With all the FS Pros going out of fashion, maybe I can find one used on ebay?

Or maybe I’ll just stick to breaking my own records with my £12 Speedo.

Link to Speedo LZR Racer
Link to Engineering The World’s Fastest Swimsuit on Science Daily

If you know me at all then you know I’m biased against the gym. The Better Business Beaureau has some more fuel for my anti-gym fire. Complaints received by BBB about fitness clubs have risen more than 90% over the past 5 years, largely due to billing complaints.

• 41.5% due to contract disputes
• 31.7% due to billing issues

Consumer Reports followed up with a survey to its subscribers that showed

• The happiest customers were those who used a local or independent gyms (YMCA, community centers, yoga studios, etc)
• Life Time fitness was the only big chain that made it to the top of the Ratings. Bally Total Fitness was at the very bottom
• 16% of respondents reported contract or billing problems
• 38% had trouble cancelling their memberships

My only experience with a U.S. gym was 24 Hour Fitness in Austin, Texas. My only complaints are about the personal trainer I saw for a few weeks. But to her credit, she was always on time and always made me push myself. My complaint is that she didn’t listen to “my needs” and she treated me like I didn’t know anything about food, nutrition or basic physiology. She was always focussed on looks over fitness. “This one’s great for toning.” Toning is bullshit. I was there to be a better runner.

Aside from that singular case, I actually really loved the gym. They had awesome yoga classes, even some at 6am so I could go before work. And the gym itself was clean and spacious (everything really IS bigger in Texas). I also got a sweet work discount, paying less than $30 per month which felt like a steal, a way better use of money than Cable TV.

Still, I think I need to start a How to Get Fit Without the Gym series. But that’s for another time.

On a completely different note, I think there is a ghost in my house that keeps turning down the burner on this pot of beans I’m trying to cook so I can make a 7-Bean and Lager Chili with Vegan Cornbread. But first I must go to the pool, which is, sadly enough, located in my local gym.

Link to Joining a Gym? Complaints to BBB reveal how to get fit while avoiding the pitfalls
Link to Gym complaints soar

As mentioned, I have a mild cold. I’m supposed to go to my swim lesson tonight, and I really don’t want to skip it because I already missed last week. Seeking answers, I typed my query on the Goog. Here’s what exercise physiologist Elizabeth Quinn reckons:

The average adult has two to three upper respiratory infections each year. Many athletes wonder if they should continue their training routine when sick. While research is limited, most experts recommend that if your symptoms are above the neck and you have no fever, exercise is probably safe. Intensive exercise should be postponed until a few days after the symptoms have gone away. However, if there are symptoms or signs of the flu, such as fever, extreme tiredness, muscle aches, swollen lymph glands, then at least two weeks should probably be allowed before you resume intensive training.

A small study conducted by Thomas G. Weidner at Ball State University backs up her claim. Researchers infected a group of volunteers with a rhinovirus and divided them into two groups: exercising and non-exercising. The exercising group trained at 70% of their measured heart rate for 40 minutes a day.

At the conclusion of the study, analysis of exercise training data, physical activity profiles, symptom severity scores and actual mucous weight measurement showed no statistically significant difference between the exercising and non-exercising groups.

The authors reiterated a useful model for exercising during a cold. If symptoms such as a runny nose, sneezing or a scratchy throat exist (so-called “above-the-neck” symptoms), it is probably safe for an individual to exercise at a lower intensity. If these symptoms recede in the first few minutes of exercise, intensity may be increased accordingly. Exercise is not, however, recommended for individuals experiencing “below-the-neck” symptoms of a cold, such as fever, sore muscles or joints, vomiting or diarrhea, or a productive cough.

I’ll see if I can back up Thomas and Elizabeth’s claims after my swim tonight. I’ve exercised on a cold in the past but this always seemed to make it worse, but it’s quite likely I pushed myself too hard. In fact, I took two very leisurely turns around Clissold Park this morning and it felt terrific; it cleared up my nose and, well, I couldn’t have asked for a more beautiful day.

My swim is from 7:30-8:15. I am going to have a light meal at 5ish, and then something small after my swim, following which I am going to crawl into bed and try to sleep for a very long time.

Link to Should I exercise with a cold? at About.com
Link to Can you still exercise even with a runny nose? at BlueSuitMom.com