The evidence against sugar continues to mount– now there’s good evidence that sugar in the diet may contribute to heart disease risk.

Researchers looked at the diets of over 6,000 people over the course of 7 years (from 1999-2006) and put each person in one of 5 groups depending on the percentage of added sugars in their diets.

Those who consumed less than 5% of total calories as added sugars were the reference group; the second group consumed between 5-10% of total calories as added sugars, the third group 10%-17.5%, the fourth group 17.5% to just under 25%, and the fifth group consumed a whopping 25% or more of total calories as added sugars.

Next the researchers looked at measures in the blood known to be associated with heart disease. Among other things they looked at HDL (“good”) cholesterol levels, triglycerides and ratio of triglycerides to HDL (a low ratio means very low risk for heart disease).

One of the biggest keys to long-term health and fat loss is being consistently good with your nutrition. Many people know this, yet they often struggle to find the motivation or willpower to consistently eat healthy. This causes people to fluctuate between eating right and going through periods of overeating or eating unhealthy foods. Until these behaviors change and healthy eating become the norm, long-term success will remain elusive. Fortunately there is something you can do to improve your ability to consistently eat the right foods and keep progressing with your health and fitness.

     I can’t count the number of times people have said things to me such as, “I wish I had your motivation” or “I just don’t have that much willpower.” These comments were generally made because I eat healthy the vast majority of the time and have exercised consistently for over 15 years. I can see why people could make those types of comments, but the reality is my motivation and willpower are probably not any better than those of the average person.

     Like most people, if there is a lot of junk food sitting around at home I will feel tempted and probably eat some or maybe even a lot of whatever is around. Of course, to avoid this type of problem, I rarely have junk food around the house. This is a simple example of the secret to developing the willpower to succeed. The truth is that problems attributed to a lack of willpower generally have very little to do with willpower and are actually related to your environment and how well you prepare yourself for success. In other words, the better your preparation, the greater your willpower.

There’s good news for chocolate lovers!

Consuming as little as a square of chocolate per day could help reduce the risk of hypertension and heart disease, according to a new study in the European Heart Journal.

Researchers analyzed data from over 19,000 middle-aged men and women in a study called the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer (EPIC).

The subjects were followed for an average of 8 years. Measurements- including blood pressure- were taken upon enrollment, and the participants were given dietary questionnaires.  They also completed questionnaires every two to three years reporting information about chronic disease and the incidence of both heart attack and stroke.

The data revealed some very good news for chocolate lovers.

Participants whose chocolate intake ranked among the highest 25 percent (an average of 7.5 grams per day of chocolate) had lower blood pressure and a significantly reduced risk of heart attack or stroke compared to subjects whose intake was lowest (average of 1.7 grams per day).

Carbohydrates are misunderstood and needlessly made confusing by so many self assuming experts. Carbohydrates are often viewed as the enemy and consuming them is a fate worse the death! Well not that bad, but why are so many people scared of Carbs?

 
Some people are more scared of Carbs than death!

It comes down to understanding. Understanding carbohydrates can be confusing because there are many different ways to categorize carbohydrates and (systems used to measure carbs). Here in lies the problem. So my solution is to give you a schooling in carbs, lets begin.

The eight main different types of carbohydrate are (with examples):

• Low G.I Carbs (Sweet Potato)
• Hi G.I (White potato)
• Fibrous Carbs (Green Vegetables)
• Starchy Carbs (Rice, Potato)
• Refined Carbs (Processed sugar, white sugar or Soft Drink)
• Natural Carbs (Fruit, Fructose)
• Simple Carbs/Sugars (Glucose, Lollies)
• Complex Carbs (broken down into 2 categories, fibrous and starchy)

Being the Nutritionist at CP, a lot of clients like to give me recipes to try, which is a nice perk. Or they make the recipe for me, which is an even nicer perk! Anyway, one CP client just gave me a recipe for a soup that sounds delicious (thanks Lisa).

Now I will say that I have not yet tried the soup, I plan on making it very soon, but I do trust Lisa’s judgement. She also gave me a wheatberry salad recipe that is to die for, and at some point I will post that up as well. I just thought that given the cold rainy weather we have had for the past few days up here in New England, that a nice warm soup would really hit the spot!

In my mind meat, eggs, and dairy products from pasture-raised animals are ideal for your health. Compared with conventional feedlot-raised animals, they offer you a much greater nutrient profile. They are richer in antioxidants and vitamins; including vitamins A, C, D, E, and K. Additionally, they do not contain traces of added hormones, antibiotics or other drugs and they do not eat grass that has been treated with herbicides and pesticides.

There are a number of nutritional differences between the meat of pasture-raised grass-fed animals and conventional feedlot-raised animals. Meat from grass-fed cattle, sheep, and bison are leaner, and can have up to one third as much fat content as a similar cut from a grain-fed animal. Not only are grass-fed pasture-raised animals leaner, the fat content of their meat is of a higher quality. Meat from grass-fed animals has two to four times more omega-3 fatty acids than meat from grain-fed animals. Omega-3 fats can reduce blood pressure, decrease LDL, decrease triglycerides, slow the growth of a wide array of cancers, regulate heartbeat, are essential for your brain, eyes and nerves, and people with diets rich in omega-3 fats are less likely to suffer from depression, schizophrenia, attention deficit disorder, or Alzheimer’s disease.

The media loves to report on the wonderful health benefits of soy foods. It’s everywhere – we hear it can prevent diseases and do things like lower cholesterol. But there is a very dark side to soy and it isn’t pretty. All the ‘so called experts’ who support soy can kiss my arse as there is plenty of research to support what I am saying.

Many people looking to increase their state of health, reduce their body fat, and increase muscle often turn to soy thinking that the health benefits make it a worthwhile food to eat. Most of the time these people don’t understand the health benefits of soy and consume it with the mentality ‘they said it’s was good for me’.

In reality, misguided consumption of soy has unwanted health consequences.

Soy is Everywhere

A quick browse in the supermarket reveals a growing trend – soy products are in. You can find soy nuts, soy hotdogs, soy bacon, soy cheese, soy milk... It’s everywhere and it’s no wonder. The media has spent a lot of time over the past few years talking about how wonderful soy is. The message they are trying to convey is that if you want to be healthy, you will eat soy foods. You will replace regular milk with soy milk, cereal with soy cereal, chicken with soy chicken (I made that one up but you get the point)

Do you notice a pattern with these soy products? Most of them – or at least the most popular ones, resemble meat or dairy products in some way. They are PROCESSED to mimic the flavor and texture of things like chicken, hot dogs, and cheese. Notice the word “processed”. Processing does not make a food more nutritious, in fact it robs food of its nutrients. 

Everyone has problem areas; you know those areas that seem to accumulate fat more than other areas in your body. For many people, those areas are the first places you gain fat when you gain weight and the last places you lose fat when you lose weight, which is why they are such a problem. There are a ridiculous number of pills, powders, exercise products, diets, etc. all promising to make fat from your problem areas disappear, often in as little as 4 to 6 weeks. Of course, this is all just marketing hype to sell what are usually disappointing products that sound much better than they actually are.

If these products really worked, practically everyone would have their ideal body, but having a great body is never as simple as just taking a supplement or using an exercise product for a few weeks. I would like to be able to tell you that there is some magical nutritional program you can follow or a secret new exercise you can use to make fat from your problem areas go away, but the reality is not that exciting. The good news is that you can lose fat from your problem areas, but the best way to get to those areas does not involve a specific exercise, workout, or even a specific eating program.

Eating right and exercising are both critical for developing a great body, but the key to losing fat from those stubborn areas is being consistent with your nutrition and exercise program. This may sound overly simplistic, but it is the most effective way and I will explain why. I should also point out that while this is technically a simple approach, it is generally a challenge for most people to do well.

In Supplements Part 1, I showed and explained my supplement heirarchy pyramid and looked at the category of General Use Supplements.  Today, I’ll finish up by looking at Performance Supplements and the Esoterica Categories.  Again, the list below isn’t meant to necessarily be comprehensive, there will always be very specialty use things that might have applications in very specific circumstances.   Rather, it’s meant to be a broad look at products which are both research supported (in the case of performance supplements) and have the broadest application of uses for mixed sports athletes.

.Performance Supplements

As opposed to the general use supplements which are meant to support basic health, etc. performance supplements are those that have (or are purported to have) direct impacts on performance in training or competition.

In this section, I’ve listed a handful of products that are supported (to one degree or another) by at least some type of strong research into their efficacy. This is basically what separates supplements in this category from the esoterica category discussed last. When products in the esoterica category have sufficient research behind them, they move into the performance supplement category; this happens rarely.

With that said, I’d like to look at the handful of current performance oriented supplements that mixed sports athlete might consider using. These are all products with at least some amount of supporting research (in healthy human athletes) which make them a worthwhile consideration. Again, this should only occur after the daily diet and other aspects of around workout nutrition and general use supplements are being implemented consistently.

On the support forum is a thread where folks can make suggestions for articles.  Among them, someone mentioned an article on supplements.  I had previously (I think in one of the newsletters) made a list of my ‘Top 10 supplements’ or whatever but since the archives are now defunct, it needed to be recreated.   Since what I want to do is going to be long, as usual I’m going to split it into two pieces.

For the record, this is actually the near entirety of Chapter 11 from the soon to be completed project: Applied Nutrition for Mixed Sports.  I had mentioned this in the last newsletter and the final files are being processed right now, after one more edit it will be made available.  Probably in about 2 more weeks.

The project actually started life as a seminar I did in Vancouver last year  for the Simon Fraser University soccer and football athletes. When completed, the product will include 2 DVD’s along with the original Powerpoint slides as well as a complete 80 page stand alone book examining the topic that I wrote to go along with it (the book started out as handouts I gave to the athletes but I decided to write an entire book around the handouts).  As always, newsletter subscribers will get first crack at it at a discounted price so go sign up if you haven’t already.

And with that out of the way, here’s a quick look at the topic of supplements, while the information was originally aimed at mixed sports (think team sports, boxing, MMA, anything that requires a mix of strength, endurance, etc. for performance), what I have to say pretty much applies to other areas as well including bodybuilding and pure strength training.

Of course, I’m sure readers will have some pet supplement that they take for some very specific reason (e.g. B12 because they lack the absorption factor, or something to control blood cholesterol or whatever).  The list below isn’t meant to be comprehensive.  Rather, it’s meant to look at the supplements that have the most broadly generalized use and application (for all types of athletes) along with having research or backing to support their use.  So please don’t get edgy in the comments if I left out something that you just swear by for some very specific use.

How many calories do you really need to gain muscle?

Before I let loose, let me say that I get you. I know what it's like to have a metabolism akin to a hummingbird on trailer-park meth. Hell, I still get hungry 20 minutes after eating a meal. I understand your situation.

Now that we have that outta the way...

Hey. How about you pick up the freakin' fork? No, you're not "gonna get fat" if you eat a few extra hundred calories needed to build more muscle. You're not gonna "lose your abs".

"But Nate, I eat a lot already."

Oh yeah? Do you really?

I'm upset you're making me do this because I really loathe math, but let's break out a formula to see how many calories you really need to gain muscle.

Grab your calculator. This is gonna hurt your head.

Step 1: Figure out Resting Metabolic Rate (RMR)

RMR is the energy it costs to keep your body alive. If you just sat on the couch for the entire day, your RMR is how many calories you'd need to take in. Let's figure out our RMR's and then look to add muscle.

Skinny Dude, 155 pounds at 9% body fat.

Tambako the Jaguar

There is a lot to be said about milk, It has long been a staple of our diets around the world and is really a food that has stood the test of time. Only recently has Milk been pasteurised before then it was used to nourish populations on a daily basis, not to mention Milk is the base upon which we have yoghurt and cheese.

Hippocrates, Pilany, Varro, Marcellus and Empiricus the leading physicians of their day all used raw milk in their treatment of diseases. Even today in Germany successful raw milk therapy is provided in many hospitals to cure and treat disease. The only difference is that todays milk is normally pasteurised or homogenised milk and getting Real Raw Milk is getting harder and harder.

Real Milk is not Pasteurised - This process destroys enzymes, denatures the anti-microbial properties and immune stimulating components, destroys the fragile milk protein, kills the beneficial bacteria and kills off all the vitamins and minerals.  Basically it turns a beautiful complete food into something nearly useless, the only thing that can withstand the heat processing is the fat content of the milk. Considering many people drink skimmed milk that leaves them with a pretty useless cup of milk.

I am not now, and have never been, a vegetarian.

OK, that’s not entirely true, I flirted with vegetarianism briefly a few decades ago, right around the time I was also experimenting with sideburns and dashikis. But for most of my adult life- and certainly for all the time I’ve been a nutritionist- I’ve been an unrepentant consumer of animal products.

It’s not that I’m not sympathetic to the animal welfare folks- in fact, I count myself among them (it’s a big tent, folks!) I belong to just about every animal activist group on the planet and care deeply about animal welfare. But while I share with my vegan friends a deep concern for all sentient beings, I happen to believe that we humans do better with some animal products in our diet.

Of course, God is in the details, so let me be a little more specific.

Despite arguments to the contrary, the fact remains that we humans are omnivores. We can eat- and thrive- on most anything edible. And for all of the 2.4 million years the human genus has been on the planet, we have eaten from what I call the “Jonny Bowden Four Food Groups”—food we could have hunted, fished, gathered or plucked. The exact proportions of animal vs. vegetable food that we consumed varied widely depending on where we lived. The Inuit, for example, thrived on a diet largely consisting of seal meat and whale blubber (very few vegetables grow in the freezing cold) while the Bantu of South Africa thrived on a diet very high in carbohydrates and the Masai did quite well on a diet rich with cow’s blood.

But it’s almost impossible to point to a society or a culture that has thrived and prospered without eating any animal products. (The only group I can think of that does it successfully is Tibetian monks, and they don’t reproduce.) When Dan Buettner did his landmark research on the areas of the globe where there are the greatest numbers of healthy centenarians (areas known as “The Blue Zones”) he found that three of the four societies studied did indeed eat meat (albeit not that much of it). The only exception was the Seventh Day Adventists in Loma Linda.

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Unfortunately in the modern day environment with stress, intermittent eating and poor nutrient value of many processed foods, our bodies can get stuck in a mode of fat storage and starvation.

This can make us insulin resistant, mess with our blood sugars and make us feel downright horrible in spite of eating all the time. The core problem comes down to processed foods failing to nourish our bodies leaving us hungry and our bodies literally starving even if we think we eat enough or even too much, if the human body is significantly overweight it is likely to be starving of nutrients. So how can we solve this?

We need to shunt our bodies out of starvation mode, and this comes down to a few main factors:

1. Feeling safe


2. Knowing we have access to food


3. Moderate exercise


4. Not fasting for too long


5. A Nutrient Rich Diet

Fat loss continues to be one of the most popular topics in health and fitness and people are always looking for new ways to lose weight and improve the way they look. Companies are always promoting new and often untested products such as pills, powders, creams, exercise equipment, and diets to promote fat loss, but the vast majority of these things are marketing gimmicks that are rarely as effective as previously established methods for losing fat. One such proven method for increasing fat loss that often goes overlooked is nutritional journaling.

If you are unfamiliar with the concept of nutritional journaling, it is basically just writing down what you eat and drink throughout the day, although there are many different ways to go about keeping a nutrition journal. A journal can be very thorough or much more simplistic, but keeping virtually any type of nutrition journal should increase the amount of fat you lose.

It may not seem as though keeping track of what you eat and drink would significantly affect fat loss, but you can see how powerful nutritional journals are by taking a closer look at the most popular and enduring weight loss businesses. Most popular programs do not necessarily use a journal, but they generally use something to help you keep track of what you eat. This typically involves things like following a point system or eating pre-made meals that have specific calorie contents.