Brent Kearney

The American Heart Association (AHA) recently issued some revised guidelines for healthy diet and lifestyle, I recently learned via Nubella’s newsfeed. I guess the guidelines are an improvement, but they don’t go far enough, which is troublesome: what were they like before the revision?

The new recommendations include:

• * Do 30 minutes of physical activity each day.
• * Transfats should make up no more than 1% of total caloric intake.
• * Avoid exposure to tobacco products.
• * Cut back on sugary foods and drinks.

… among others.

The problem with the “30 minutes of activity” recommendation is that they add that the activity need not be all together. For example, 5 minutes of walking to the bus counts as part of that. This seems rather pathetically inadequate to me. It amounts to a recommendation against not moving all day, every day. Well duh. I admit that I don’t know how they came up with 30 minutes, but I doubt that the research that was used showed that any motion whatsoever, so long as together the amount of time in motion added up to 30 minutes, resulted in cardiovascular fitness.

If your aim is a strong heart, much better advice would be to exercise at least three times per week. By “exercise”, I mean an aerobic workout, where you significantly increase your heart rate and breathing for more than 20 continuous minutes. The heart rate should be sustained at 60 to 90% of the maximum (maximum is usually around 220 minus your age). And by “at least”, I mean it would be preferable to exercise five days per week, but you can get away with three days per week and still have cardiovascular fitness gains. (Assuming that three days per week isn’t less than your current activity level!)

I wonder how many people actually get less than 30 minutes of “physical activity” per day? It would seem that you’d never get out of bed. I suppose that if it only takes 2 minutes to get into the car, 2 minutes to get to a chair in the office and back, and 10 minutes of going back and forth to and from the toilet, one could get away with only 18 minutes of motion in a day. *Shudder* That is some serious abuse of the self.

I have no idea where the AHA came up with 1% of caloric intake as a safe upper limit on trans fats in the human diet. There have been conclusive studies showing that there is no safe upper limit for consuming trans fats.
Studies have shown that diets with even a small amount of trans fatty acids increases the level of LDL cholesterol (the bad kind) in the blood, while at the same time inhibit the heart’s ability to create HDL cholesterol (the good kind). It also increases the tendency for blood platelets to clot, and last but not least causes internal inflamation, increasing risk of stroke and heart attacks. Trans fats result in a four-pronged attack on the heart. These trans fats are the man-made type: oils that have been hydrogenated. They are poisonous to your health, and should be avoided at all costs short of starvation. This means that if you were stranded on a desert island with a huge supply of McDonald’s food, you should only eat it when you are on the verge of death by starvation trying to catch fish, have run out of seaweed and can’t swallow any more dirt. Its that bad.

AHA recommends that you avoid exposure to tobacco products. This means that if you smoke, stop, and regardless of whether you smoke, avoid second-hand smoke. This is sound advice, but I doubt that many smokers will get it. Smokers probably don’t care too much about their health in the first place, and are unlikely to be readers of health bulletins from Heart Associations. There is no lack of information about how bad cigarettes are for you, but I’d like to share this little tidbit, published in 1999, by Mike Stroud:

It is clearly so unnatural and likely to cause harm that it is hard to understand how smoking was ever accepted as a reasonable thing to do. Yet, while nobody believes the contorted arguments of the tobacco industry that try to dismiss the link between smoking and damage to the lungs in the form of bronchitis and cancer, many people do not realise that the danger from cigarette smoking does not stop there. By mechanisms not entirely clear, smoking markedly contributes to atherosclerosis in the coronary arteries, as well as the furring up of blood vessels elsewhere. Many smokers will therefore have heart attacks and strokes, and may even lose their limbs, well before their time. As a practicing hospital doctor, I can state without prejudice that I almost never see a patient under the age of 40 who has had a heart attack but who is not an avid proponent of the weed. For that matter, most of those I see in their 50s and 60s are also keenly addicted.

And last, but certainly not least, the AHA’s recommendation to “cut back on sugar”. Again, this is a major understatement. The sugar in the average North American diet is probably the number one contributor to the expanding obesity epidemic (excuse the pun), and certainly the type-2 diabetes epidemic. Fatty foods are likely a close second.

For millions of years, we evolved to digest naturally occurring sugars in fruits — processed sugar is only a recent luxury. Now we dump it down our gullets by the mouthfull, and it is added to most processed foods, exploiting our weakness for it. The empty calories do add up though, and the results can be devastating. I again draw on Mike Stroud’s work. This excerpt is a striking example of how a few extra calories can add up:

In 1995, newspapers in the United States reported the death of the fattest man in the world. He had come to weigh 465 kilogrammes, or around 1,000 pounds. On a visit to hospital he had to be transported by forklift truck, and after his death the wall of his bedroom had to be demolished in order to remove the body. Obviously he was an extreme example of the obesity problem, yet it would have required a weight gain of only 37 grammes per day to take him from a normal 70 killogrammes (155 pounds) at the age of sixteen up to the grotesque proportions of his death at just 45 years of age. This is the equivalent of eating an extra 250 calories per day — less than one small bar of chocolate.

I’m not suggesting that processed sugar needs to be entirely eliminated from the diet, and I’m sure that is what the American Heart Association has in mind when they choose conservative words such as “cut back”. However, it is clear that obesity, heart disease, diabetes and all of these related health problems which are reaching epidemic levels indicate that way too many people are gorging on sugars and fats, and do not exercise.

Extra calories gained by the odd sugar indulgence would be quickly burned off by active individuals — that is, people for whom exercise is part of their daily lifestyle. Of course there are always limits; if you take in more calories than you burn, you will inevitably gain body weight. Sugar and fat just happen to supply large amounts of calories, so if you’re going to consume them, you should also be spending a good deal of time doing hard physical work.

Note that this does not apply to trans fats! Consuming this man-made Frankenstein “food” will magically expand your waistline, regardless of the usual calorie physics. This disturbing fact was revealed in a six-year study using monkeys. The monkeys were fed minimal diets, with one group having 8% trans fats. That group somehow managed to add 30% more fat to their bellies than the other group. Waistline fat dramatically increases the risk of diabetes, and I have heard it said that the waistline is one of the best indicators of overall health. Eating something that by its very nature adds fat to this area is an unwise thing to do. Everyone should eliminate it from their diets, and join the effort to lobby for a ban on trans fats.

The largest city in Canada draws mixed opinions from across the federation. Some love it, and most hate it. Those who love it are those who live there, for the most part. This man, Mr. Toronto, sets the bar for loving Toronto. "Toronto Appreciation Day" just rolled through Banff, and its on the way to Calgary and Edmonton, where I’m sure that it will receive a warm welcome. Be sure to leave some feedback for him; give Toronto the love that it deserves ;-).

My last post on this subject mentioned that I developed shin splints prior to my first race, which was on May 20th. The injury was very minor – the following day I had no pain, and I stuck with my decision to stay away from running until the race. I took up swimming laps (hard!) and cycling instead. I think that it worked OK, in terms of aerobic fitness, but in the final 2km or so of the race, I started getting cramps in my calves. This forced forced me to slow down considerably, adding minutes to my time.

The race itself was a lot of fun. I got there an hour before the start time, and there were throngs of runners standing around stretching, there were sponsors setting up their tents, and merchandising their products. The Ski Patrol was there, loading their first-aid supplies onto mountain-bikes. Rock music bellowed from a sound system that was powered by a portable generator. The music, the sponsors and all of the anxious runners created an exciting atmosphere.

The registration line-up went fairly quickly, and I received my number sign, which I had to pin to my shirt. That really annoyed me — high performance, breathable sportswear isn’t cheap, and now my Arc’teryx base layer has 8 holes in it. The race didn’t start on schedule, which was also disappointing. It was quite windy out, and a bit chilly. I had been running around getting warmed up in preparation for a 10:00 start time, which was described on the schedule as, "10:00 sharp". We didn’t get started until about 10:20, and I had to go back to my vehicle, down the road, to get extra clothing to keep warm in the cool wind.

The 5km race started at around 10:10, only 10 minutes before the 10km race. This meant that fast runners in the 10km race had to deal with passing the slower runners in the 5km race. Not the best setup. They should have staggered the races by 30 minutes to avoid congestion, and probably discouragement for the 5km racers who were passed.

Having been my first race, I didn’t know where I stood, competitively, so I choose a spot in the middle of the pack of 141 competitors to start. The starting line, also the finish line in a 5km loop, was at the top of a big hill. This made for a cruel push right at the end of the race. After the starting gun, the pack of runners started on a slow pace, which increased only slightly as the path ran down into a forested valley. It was a very dry day, and the dust kicked up by the running crowds made it difficult to see and breath, until we got into the forest, where the path became narrow and covered in roots and rocks.

After a few minutes, I realized that the pace wasn’t going to pick up, and so I started passing people wherever I could. This proved to be a difficult task on the single-track trail. There were trees and rocks on both sides of the trail, making opportunities for passing scarce. Only a minute into the race, some people were standing in the woods off to the side of the trail, letting crowds of faster runners go by. I suppose that they choose to start at the beginning of the pack, realizing their mistake after dozens of faster runners were tripping over them trying to get by.

I had to constantly “brake”, keeping close eye on the heels of the person in front of me, for fear of tripping both them and myself, which in the tight line of runners, would have resulted in high-speed game of down-hill twister. The trail ran south-east into a valley bottom, where it crossed small streams over rocks. It then continued south, uphill out of the valley, and turned east again, on a gradual uphill slope. I found that the best places to pass were on the steeper uphill parts, where nearly everyone slows down, some to a walk. This required bursts of extra energy, but I could often pass 6 or 7 people in one short uphill distance, so it was an effective strategy, despite the required recovery period afterwards.

I also found that I had a big advantage over other runners on down-hill sections of trail. Throughout the entire 10km, I didn’t see anyone who ran as fast as I downhill. Perhaps it was my very active winter of aggressive downhill skiing that developed muscles well-suited to the task, or maybe it was a psychological thing, and people were afraid of twisting ankles or not being able to react fast enough when sprinting down trails. In some places though, my desire to accelerate down-hill was a disadvantage, where there was no room to pass, and those in front of me put on the brakes. I literally tripped over one of them, stumbling to the ground.

It took about 4km before I felt that I was “out of the crowd”, and I could run at my own pace. I probably made the most gains in the 3 or 4 km following that, over a gently sloping east-bound trail, that turned north, and then west again, into a much steeper climb for about 1000m, then down again, and then back up a final steep pitch. I crossed the 5km finish line after 21 minutes, and I was thinking at the time that had I been running the 5km race, I would have been very competitive. I was pacing myself for 10km though, thinking that the last few kilometers would probably make the biggest difference.

The second lap was much easier as far as crowds go. I think that I was far ahead of the slower runners, and gaining on the faster ones. Until my calves decided that they had had enough, and shot some searing pain signals up to my brain. I ignored them as much as I could, but eventually I had to stop and stretch, then resume at a much slower pace then I wanted. Numerous people passed me, and the minutes piled on.

I still had a respectable finish though, for a first-time race runner. I was in the top 3rd overall, at 41st place. I was 14th in my age & gender category, out of 42. My time was 48:23; the best time in my category was 39:17 and the worst was 1:09:12. I think I could have improved my time by at least 5 minutes, had I started near the beginning of the crowd, and had my calves held together for another couple of kilometers.

The official results are here.

My next race is this Saturday, at Sibbald Flats. It was sold out when I registered — there is a 150-person limit, because the course goes through an ecologically sensitive area — so I’m on the waiting list. Whether I run in the race depends on registered runners not showing up. They tell me it happens a lot, so I’m hoping to get in.

On race-day this time, I’ll do a few things differently. I’ll ask the organizers for an honest estimate of the start time, before I begin my warm up. I’ll get as close to the front of the pack at the start of the race as I can — although, I’m sure that I won’t be the only one vying for this position. I’ll push fairly hard right at the start of the race, to get out in front, and then try to keep pace with the faster runners throughout the race. I’ll also bring my own water bottle for after the race — it was difficult to find water at the race, and my cramping calves could have been due to dehydration. From now until Saturday, I’ll be drinking as much water as I can stand.

My resting heart rate right now is 56 bpm. :)

It’s Devil’s Day, and religious nutters around the world are praying that, now that End of Days is imminent, the Devil doesn’t get us. Not to miss the chance to separate a fool from his money, Internet entrepreneurs took advantage of the prophecy by taking bets on whether the Rapture is indeed today. It started at 10-to-1 odds, but has since fallen to 10,000-to-1, with bets closing on Friday. Those who bet that the world will end today must be looking forward to a big pay-off if it does.

The end is near! Repent! Repent! And have a wicked 6-6-6.