Go, Speedracer, Go!
If you don't own the Nike Sport Kit and would rather not break out your handy calculator to figure out how fast you're running, visit this Arkansasrunner.com . Caloriecontrol.org provides some easy calculators to estimate the amount of calories you burned. Ironmate.co.uk gives a good breakdown of calorie expenditure for the different triathlon components performed at different speeds. It also notes that the calories used "are based on economical efficient movements" and "calories estimates are [only] approximate. Please keep this fact in mind whenever you use calorie calculators/estimators.
The same holds true for the devises you use to keep track of your exercise, such as pedometers, treadmills, heart rate monitors, or the Nike Sport Kit. While my clients know that I'm not one to recommend unnecessary gear , I actually like the Sport Kit. While it isn't all that accurate when running steep hills (a definite minus in San Francisco), it does provide some good motivational tools: Nike website records your progress, speed, and accomplishments as well as plan virtual races with your friends. If that gets you moving, it's worth the $30.
Sunday, July 29, 2007
Thursday, July 26, 2007
My Opinion: Obesity is Contagious?
Firstly, I would like to say that this is a gross misuse of the word "contagious," and to me the study seems to be anecdotal science at best.
Perhaps the article should have began: Bad habits can "spread from person to person, much like a virus, researchers are reporting today. When a person gains weight, close friends tend to gain weight, too."
Consider the following paragraphs, and how they fail to support the word choice "contagious":
I've highlighted some parts of the article (which I've included in its entirety following this post) that are interesting.
Perhaps the article should have began: Bad habits can "spread from person to person, much like a virus, researchers are reporting today. When a person gains weight, close friends tend to gain weight, too."
Consider the following paragraphs, and how they fail to support the word choice "contagious":
There was no effect when a neighbor gained or lost weight, however, and family members had less influence than friends.
Proximity did not seem to matter: the influence of the friend remained even if the friend was hundreds of miles away. And the greatest influence of all was between mutual close friends. There, if one became obese, the odds of the other becoming obese were nearly tripled.
If "contagion" in the true sense was a concern, then wouldn't proximity matter? If only genetics were to blame, then family members would have more, not less, influence than friends. Contagion, hardly. Think instead of influence.
Our parents might have been on to something (shocking!) when they were concerned about whether or not we were hanging out with the wrong crowd. They did not want us becoming desensitized to the other teens' bad habits: smoking, drinking, &c. In the case of gaining weight, perhaps the bad habits off less fit friends that are easy to assume would be larger portion sizes, snacking, extra helpings, and tempting but unhealthy food choices. People who are friends with each other tend to share common interests which are reinforced through shared experiences. If you're trying to become healthier and spending a lot of time with an unfit friend whose favorite activities include watching a videos or playing x-box, it wouldn't be surprising if you gained weight. This influence works both ways. A client mentioned that one of the pluses of her work environment was that her coworkers are fit and like to partake in group activities such as kayaking, hiking, and sports.
I've highlighted some parts of the article (which I've included in its entirety following this post) that are interesting.
Controversial New York Times Article On Obesity
Study Says Obesity Can Be Contagious
By GINA KOLATA
Their study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, involved a detailed analysis of a large social network of 12,067 people who had been closely followed for 32 years, from 1971 until 2003. The investigators knew who was friends with whom, as well as who was a spouse or sibling or neighbor, and they knew how much each person weighed at various times over three decades. That let them examine what happened over the years as some individuals became obese. Did their friends also become obese? Did family members or neighbors?
The answer, the researchers report, was that people were most likely to become obese when a friend became obese. That increased a person’s chances of becoming obese by 57 percent.
There was no effect when a neighbor gained or lost weight, however, and family members had less influence than friends.
Proximity did not seem to matter: the influence of the friend remained even if the friend was hundreds of miles away. And the greatest influence of all was between mutual close friends. There, if one became obese, the odds of the other becoming obese were nearly tripled.
The same effect seemed to occur for weight loss, the investigators say. But since most people were gaining, not losing, over the 32 years of the study, the result was an obesity epidemic.
Dr. Nicholas Christakis, a physician and professor of medical sociology at Harvard Medical School and a principal investigator in the new study, says one explanation is that friends affect each others’ perception of fatness. When a close friend becomes obese, obesity may not look so bad.
“You change your idea of what is an acceptable body type by looking at the people around you,” Dr. Christakis said.
The investigators say their findings can help explain why Americans have become fatter in recent years — each person who became obese was likely to drag some friends with them.
Their analysis was unique, Dr. Christakis said, because it moved beyond a simple analysis of one person and his or her social contacts, and instead examined an entire social network at once, looking at how a person’s friend’s friend’s friends, or spouse’s sibling’s friends, could have an influence on a person’s weight. The effects, Dr. Christakis said, “highlight the importance of a spreading process, a kind of social contagion, that spreads through the network.”
Of course, the investigators say, social networks are not the only factors that affect body weight. There is a strong genetic component at work as well.
Science has shown that individuals have genetically determined ranges of weights, spanning perhaps 30 or so pounds for each person. But that leaves a large role for the environment in determining whether a person’s weight is near the top of his or her range or near the bottom. As people have gotten fatter, it appears that many are edging toward the top of their ranges. The question has been why.
If the new research is correct, it may mean that something in the environment seeded what many call an obesity epidemic, leading a few people to gain weight. Then social networks let the obesity spread rapidly.
It also may mean that the way to avoid becoming fat is to avoid having fat friends.
That is not the message they meant to convey, say the study investigators, Dr. Christakis and his colleague, James Fowler, an associate professor of political science at the University of California in San Diego.
You don’t want to lose a friend who becomes obese, Dr. Christakis said. Friends are good for your overall health, he explains. So why not make friends with a thin person, he suggests, and let the thin person’s behavior influence you and your obese friend?
That answer does not satisfy obesity researchers like Kelly Brownell, director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University.
“I think there’s a great risk here in blaming obese people even more for things that are caused by a terrible environment,” Dr. Brownell said.
On average, the investigators said, their rough calculations show that a person who became obese gained 17 pounds, and the newly obese person’s friend gained 5. But some gained less or did not gain weight at all, while others gained much more.
Those extra pounds were added onto the natural increases in weight that occur when people get older. What usually happened was that peoples’ weights got high enough to push them over the boundary, a body mass index of 30, that divides overweight and obese. (For example, a six-foot-tall man who went from 220 pounds to 225 would go from being overweight to obese.)
While other researchers were surprised by the findings, Dr. Christakis said the big surprise for him was that he could do the study at all. He got the idea from talk of an obesity epidemic.
“One day I said, ‘Maybe it really is an epidemic. Maybe it spreads from person to person,’ ” Dr. Christakis recalled.
It was only by chance that he discovered a way to find out. He learned that the data he needed were contained in a large federal study of heart disease, the Framingham Heart Study, that had followed the population of Framingham, Mass. for decades, keeping track of nearly every one of its participants.
The study’s records included each participant’s address and the names of family members. In order for the researchers to be sure they did not lose track of their subjects, each was asked to name a close friend who would know where they were at the time of their next exam, in roughly four years. Since much of the town and most of the subjects’ relatives were participating, the data contained all that Dr. Christakis and his colleagues needed to reconstruct the social network and follow it for 32 years.
Their research has taken obesity specialists and social scientists aback. But many say the finding is pathbreaking, and can shed new light on how and why people have gotten so fat so fast.
“It is an extraordinarily subtle and sophisticated way of getting a handle on aspects of the environment that are not normally considered,” said Dr. Rudolph Leibel, an obesity researcher at Columbia University.
Dr. Richard Suzman, who directs the office of behavioral and social research programs at the National Institute on Aging, called it “one of the most exciting studies to come out of medical sociology in decades.” The institute financed the study.
But Dr. Stephen O’Rahilly, an obesity researcher at the University of Cambridge, said the uniqueness of the Framingham data will make it hard to replicate the new findings. No other study that he knows of includes the same kinds of long-term and detailed data on social interactions.
“I don’t want to look like an old curmudgeon, but when you come upon things that inherently look a bit implausible, you raise the bar for standards of proof,” Dr. O’Rahilly says. “Good science is all about replication, but it is hard to see how science will ever replicate this.”
“Boy, is the Framingham study unique,” Dr. O'Rahilly said.
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
The Buzz: BMI
Some of my clients have asked me my opinion about BMI, or Body Mass Index. I don't mention it often or use it to measure their progress, but it's still making headlines in the news and magazines, nonetheless.
Fitness Matters, the American Council on Exercise's professional journal, does a great job of
describing the limitations of using BMI in its May / June issue.
BMI has several significant drawbacks. It can give a skewed result for some individuals and subgroups of the population. Jay Hoffman, a professor of health and exercise science at the College of New Jersey, says that BMI's main drawback is that "it just indexes height versus weight and doesn't take into account body composition."
Bodybuilders and elite athletes end up with a high BMI score because of the extra weight associated with muscle. So do fit civilians. (The article's author, Jim Gerard notes that while he is) hardly a body builder, but (he) work(s) out every day and at 6'2" and 210 pounds, (he has) a BMI result that puts (him) in the "overweight" category despite the fact that he has a 34" waist and a flat stomach. Conversely, taller people carrying a lot of fat may have a body mass index score that falls within the acceptable range.
BMI can also skew results in the opposite direction, as it does in the elderly, who tend to have scores that underestimate their excess weight or obesity because they have much less muscle than the average person.
Miller adds that BMI is not accurate when measuring the body composition of children or some small-boned women who, despite being petite, may have a small bone and muscle mass and a high percentage of body fat.
Another limitation of BMI is that it doesn't address the location of one's body fat, which is arguably a more telling indicator of overall disease risk. Abdominal fat in particular is linked o heart disease, poor lipid profiles and type 2 diabetes. And it's more likely to lead to changes in hormone levels that cause inflamed and eventually clogged arteries. Miller says, "The theory is that abdominal fat is more mobile and that it enters the circulation more readily to form arterial plaques."
Therefore, it's quite possible to have an acceptable BMI while carrying a potentially dangerous spare tire. And certain groups of people--those from Japan and south Asia, for example--that tend to stay relatively slender can still have an increased risk of heart disease from storing unhealthy amounts of abdominal fat.
Fitness Matters, the American Council on Exercise's professional journal, does a great job of
describing the limitations of using BMI in its May / June issue.
BMI has several significant drawbacks. It can give a skewed result for some individuals and subgroups of the population. Jay Hoffman, a professor of health and exercise science at the College of New Jersey, says that BMI's main drawback is that "it just indexes height versus weight and doesn't take into account body composition."
Bodybuilders and elite athletes end up with a high BMI score because of the extra weight associated with muscle. So do fit civilians. (The article's author, Jim Gerard notes that while he is) hardly a body builder, but (he) work(s) out every day and at 6'2" and 210 pounds, (he has) a BMI result that puts (him) in the "overweight" category despite the fact that he has a 34" waist and a flat stomach. Conversely, taller people carrying a lot of fat may have a body mass index score that falls within the acceptable range.
BMI can also skew results in the opposite direction, as it does in the elderly, who tend to have scores that underestimate their excess weight or obesity because they have much less muscle than the average person.
Miller adds that BMI is not accurate when measuring the body composition of children or some small-boned women who, despite being petite, may have a small bone and muscle mass and a high percentage of body fat.
Another limitation of BMI is that it doesn't address the location of one's body fat, which is arguably a more telling indicator of overall disease risk. Abdominal fat in particular is linked o heart disease, poor lipid profiles and type 2 diabetes. And it's more likely to lead to changes in hormone levels that cause inflamed and eventually clogged arteries. Miller says, "The theory is that abdominal fat is more mobile and that it enters the circulation more readily to form arterial plaques."
Therefore, it's quite possible to have an acceptable BMI while carrying a potentially dangerous spare tire. And certain groups of people--those from Japan and south Asia, for example--that tend to stay relatively slender can still have an increased risk of heart disease from storing unhealthy amounts of abdominal fat.
Eat This, Heal... A Pulled Muscle
So you've pulled a hamstring.
Your body needs: protein and potassium for muscle repair; plus anthocyanins (plant compounds) and omega-3 fats to reduce inflammation.
Eat this: Grilled salmon over wild rice, 1-2 cups cooked broccoli. Or plain or vanilla yogurt topped with blueberries.
Your body needs: protein and potassium for muscle repair; plus anthocyanins (plant compounds) and omega-3 fats to reduce inflammation.
Eat this: Grilled salmon over wild rice, 1-2 cups cooked broccoli. Or plain or vanilla yogurt topped with blueberries.
Skip the Soda
Study Links Diet Soft Drinks With Cardiac Risk
MONDAY, July 23 (HealthDay News) -- Drinking more than one soda a day -- even if it's the sugar-free diet kind -- is associated with an increased incidence of metabolic syndrome, a cluster of risk factors linked to the development of diabetes and cardiovascular disease, a study finds.The link to diet soda found in the study was "striking" but not entirely a surprise, said Dr. Ramachandran Vasan, study senior author and professor of medicine at Boston University School of Medicine. There had been some hints of it in earlier studies, he said.
"But this is the first study to show the association in a prospective fashion and in a large population," Vasan said.
That population consisted of more than 6,000 participants in the Framingham Heart Study, which has been following residents of a Massachusetts town since 1948. When the soda portion of the study began, all participants were free of metabolic syndrome, a collection of risk factors including high blood pressure, elevated levels of the blood fats called triglycerides, low levels of the artery-protecting HDL cholesterol, high fasting blood sugar levels and excessive waist circumference. Metabolic syndrome is the presence of three or more of these risk factors.
Over the four years of the study, people who consumed more than one soft drink of any kind a day were 44 percent more likely to develop metabolic syndrome than those who didn't drink a soda a day.
The findings are published in the July 24 issue of the journal Circulation.
A variety of explanations, none proven, have been proposed for the link between diet soft drink consumption and metabolic syndrome, Vasan said. That association was evident even when the researchers accounted for other factors, such as levels of saturated fat and fiber in the diet, total calorie intake, smoking and physical activity.
One theory is that the high sweetness of all soft drinks makes a person more prone to eat sugary, fattening foods. Another is that the caramel content of soft drinks promotes metabolic changes that lead to insulin resistance. "These are hotly debated by nutritional experts," Vasan said.
Vasan, who noted that he is not a nutritional expert, said he leans toward the theory that "this is a marker of dietary behavior" -- that people who like to drink sweet soda also like to eat the kind of foods that cardiac nutritionists warn against.
"But we cannot infer causality," Vasan said, meaning there is no proof that soda itself is the villain. "We have an association. Maybe it is a causal one or maybe it is a marker of something else."
Carefully controlled animal studies might resolve the cause-and-effect issue, he said.
Dr. Elizabeth G. Nabel, director of the U.S. National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, which funds the Framingham Heart Study, said in a prepared statement: "Other studies have shown that the extra calories and sugar in soft drinks contribute to weight gain, and therefore heart disease risk. This study echoes those findings by extending the link to all soft drinks and the metabolic syndrome."
Dr. Suzanne R. Steinbaum, director of Women and Heart Disease at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, said, "There is no safe way of eating junk food, just as we learned the lesson from trans fats and partially hydrogenated oils often found in fat-free or low-fat cookies. Diet soda does not protect us from the development of what we are trying to avoid by consuming it."
More information
Learn more about metabolic syndrome at the American Heart Association.
SOURCES: Ramachandran Vasan, M.D., professor of medicine, Boston University; Suzanne R. Steinbaum, M.D., director, Women and Heart Disease, Lenox Hill Hospital, New York City; July 24, 2007, Circulation
Saturday, July 7, 2007
Eat This, Heal... A Broken Bone
Don't forget, a broken bone doesn't necessarily mean you can't work out at all. Talk with your doctor or physical therapist and see if you can get the green light to continue seeing your trainer.
Your body needs: Calcium, vitamin D, magnesium and phosphorus to help bone rebuild itself.
You should eat: A fruit smoothie made with 1 cup calcium- and vitamin-d- fortified orange juice, 1 tablespoon honey, 3/4 cup plain nonfat yogurt, and 1/2 cup chopped or slivered almonds.
Metabolism Booster
Tip: Maintain Your Metabolism
You've been reading about the benefits of exercise, but here's some news about diet. Lyssie Lakatos, R.D., co-author of Fire Up Your Metabolism reveals some interesting nutritional information in the June issue of Shape.
Are you getting enough selenium and vitamin D?
Research shows that a diet low in either of these nutrients may affect your thyroid's ability to produce metabolism-regulating hormones. You can get the recommended 55 micrograms of selenium a day with foods like tuna, turkey, and cottage cheese. You need a daily dose of 400IU of vitamin D, which is found in fortified lowfat milk and salmon.
You've been reading about the benefits of exercise, but here's some news about diet. Lyssie Lakatos, R.D., co-author of Fire Up Your Metabolism reveals some interesting nutritional information in the June issue of Shape.
Are you getting enough selenium and vitamin D?
Research shows that a diet low in either of these nutrients may affect your thyroid's ability to produce metabolism-regulating hormones. You can get the recommended 55 micrograms of selenium a day with foods like tuna, turkey, and cottage cheese. You need a daily dose of 400IU of vitamin D, which is found in fortified lowfat milk and salmon.
Fitness and Parenting
All Child-Play and No Workouts Make Dad an Unfit Boy
Below is an excerpt for a great article in the NYTimes, which explores how becoming a parent can affect a person's workouts and fitness routines. Click here for the whole article.
THEY count among their ranks former marathoners and Ironmen, beached surfers and scuba divers. They lay off red meat and trans fats. They stay current on annual physicals and take their medications as prescribed.
And yet, this group of the once-fit finds itself at risk of becoming unhealthy and stacking on the pounds, because of one threat to their physical fitness: children.
...
Too many Americans have an all-or-nothing mentality toward fitness, said Dr. Harvey B. Simon, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School. If they can’t find a 45-minute window to bike, they don’t substitute by strapping on a BabyBjörn and taking a stroll.
“There is a very common misconception, one that is shared by physicians as well as by the public, that exercise requires a set amount of time and a formal program,” said Dr. Simon, who has two grown daughters. “I’m fond of saying that the aerobic exercise movement inspired the few and discouraged the many.”
Heart-healthy exercise can take many forms (gardening, car washing, stair climbing) and needn’t be done in continuous chunks to be beneficial, said Dr. Simon, the author of “The No Sweat Exercise Plan.”
Having three and a half hours of exercise to lose puts the study’s participants well above the norm, said Janet Fulton, an epidemiologist in the division of nutrition and physical activity at the Centers for Disease Control. After all, three-quarters of Americans don’t meet the minimum requirement of two and a half hours a week, she said.
Still, cutting back on exercise as a new parent has hidden costs. “Reducing their activity in this critical period of time is probably not going to help their adjustment in terms of a new person in their house,” Dr. Fulton said. “The long-term stuff, the chronic-disease risk reduction, is great, but immediately, they’re not getting the mental-health benefit.”
For those parents who can’t stomach exercise, however, their children serve as a bulletproof cop-out. When single or childless people say they have no time to exercise, it can ring hollow. But a mother of three? Watch those heads nod in sympathy.
Reluctant exercisers use parenthood as “an excuse to not do it at all,” said Dana Wood, a mother and the health and beauty director for Cookie, a parenting magazine.
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