The diet-heart hypothesis is the idea that saturated fat, and in some versions cholesterol, raises blood cholesterol and contributes to the risk of having a heart attack. To test this hypothesis, scientists have been studying the relationship between saturated fat consumption and heart attack risk for more than half a century. What have these studies found?
~ Stephan Guyenet from, The Dirty Little Secret of the Diet-Heart Hypothesis
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Life Return On Exercise Invested – LROEI
Exercise has been show to correlate (caution, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_causation) with longevity; The people who exercise more are also the people who live longer:
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I had never thought about exercise in quite this way: If I’m going to exercise, and if the exact details of the exercise aren’t so important, WHICH exercise would I prefer to do?
Would I rather spend time indoors or outdoors?
…in a gym, or at a playground?
…alone, or with my friends?
…in a familiar place, or some place new?
There are many types of exercise. The way I’m pursuing exercise through Parkour ALSO happens to generate a greater LROEI.
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Body fat produces a hormone called leptin, which signals to the brain and other organs to decrease appetite, increase the metabolic rate and increase physical activity. More fat means more leptin, which then causes the extra fat to be burned. The little glitch is that some people become resistant to leptin, so that their brain doesn’t hear the fat tissue screaming that it’s already full. Leptin resistance nearly always accompanies obesity, because it’s a precondition of significant fat gain.
~ Stephan Guyenet from, The Body Fat Setpoint, Part II: Mechanisms of Fat Gain
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This part of his series is short and non-technical. But his whole series is, probably, the greatest explanation of why one gets fat which I have ever read.
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Went for a little hike last weekend with a group. Top-to-bottom: Bear Mountain bridge over the Hudson, View from the top, and a peak of NYC in the far distance. Stellar weather.
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My position, and that of a growing number of researchers, is that there’s more to obesity than calorie balance, and that body weight and fat mass is regulated by a complex system that involves an array of hormones and feedback mechanisms.
~ John Briffa from, «http://www.drbriffa.com/2011/03/10/is-obesity-all-in-the-mind/»
In recent months I’ve become interested in the potential role of a hormone by the name of leptin in obesity.
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It’s not “in the mind” in the sense that you can imagine your way to weight loss. But there’s definitely MORE to weight loss than the balance of calories. My experience is that the best way to lose weight is to simply reduce my calorie intakes slightly — no need to count everything and aim for a computed target intake. At the same time, include some strength training (a ton is not required, but walking/cardio is NOT what worked for me.)
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So that’s what I suggest as an alternative to dumbing down: See if you can care about your listeners or readers enough to understand why they should want to know this and what direction they can approach it from. Then work on your own understanding of the subject until you grasp it well enough to approach from that direction yourself. In the short term, that may not be as satisfying as ridiculing their stupidity, but in the long term I think it works better.
~ Doug Muder from, Instead of Dumbing Down | The Weekly Sift
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The bottom line is that experimental models of atherosclerosis appear to rely on overloading herbivorous species with dietary cholesterol that they are not equipped to clear. SFA does exacerbate the increase in LDL caused by cholesterol overload. But in the absence of excess cholesterol, it does not necessarily raise LDL even in species ill-equipped to digest these types of fats. Dietary cholesterol has a modest effect on LDL cholesterol in humans, and it has even less effect on LDL particle number, a more important measure. So there may not be a cholesterol overload for saturated fat to exacerbate in humans.
~ Stephan Guyenet from, Animal Models of Atherosclerosis: LDL
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In the context of actual amounts that you can actually consume (animal studies feed cholesterol to herbivores as if you eat 20+ eggs EVERY day) there is no evidence (not in animal studies and certainly not in human studeis) that cholesterol and saturated fat cause atherosclerosis. If you think eating cholesterol or saturated fat is bad, I hope you’ll investigate where you obtained that knowledge, and look into the factual basis of that knowledge. If you’re avoiding cholesterol and saturated fat, what are you replacing it with?
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Every morning when I wake up I say, I’ll never be as young as I am today. Today is the youngest day of the rest of my life. Get up and do something fun.
~ Rochelle Ford
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Co-pilot is ready… I need coffee. Jeep needs fuel… then, to PPK Philly!
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I went for a 45 minute walk this morning! In QM. Went about 1,800 feet (~555 meters). No standing up, just resting in a squat. This is part of a challenge some friends and I will be trying next weekend (Saturday 22nd). We’re going to attempt to bear-crawl across the Williamsburg Bridge from Brooklyn to NYC. :) If anyone in the area wants to come out and lumber over the East River with us, it’ll be in the morning and we’ll make a Facebook event for it.
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