Myths and truths....

Myths & Truths About Nutrition

Myth: Heart disease in America is caused by consumption of cholesterol and saturated fat from animal products.

Truth: During the period of rapid increase in heart disease (1920-1960), American consumption of animal fats declined but consumption of hydrogenated and industrially processed vegetable fats increased dramatically. (USDA-HNI)

Myth: Saturated fat clogs arteries.

Truth: The fatty acids found in artery clogs are mostly unsaturated (74%) of which 41% are polyunsaturated. (Lancet 1994 344:1195)

Myth: Vegetarianism is healthy.

Truth: The annual all-cause death rate of vegetarian men is slightly more than that of non-vegetarian men (.93% vs .89%); the annual death rate of vegetarian women is significantly more than that of non-vegetarian women (.86% vs .54%) (Am J Clin Nutr 1982 36:873)

Myth: Vitamin B12 can be obtained from certain plant sources such as blue-green algae and soy products.

Truth: Vitamin B12 is not absorbed from plant sources. Modern soy products increase the body's need for B12. (Soybeans: Chemistry & Technology Vol 1 1972)

Myth: For good health, serum cholesterol should be less than 180 mg/dl.

Truth: The all-cause death rate is higher in individuals with cholesterol levels lower than 180 mg/dl. (Circulation 1992 86:3:1026-1029)

Myth: Animal fats cause cancer and heart disease.

Truth: Animal fats contain many nutrients that protect against cancer and heart disease; elevated rates of cancer and heart disease are associated with consumption of large amounts of vegetable oils. (Fed Proc July 1978 37:2215)

Myth: Children benefit from a low-fat diet.

Truth: Children on low-fat diets suffer from growth problems, failure to thrive & learning disabilities. (Food Chem News 10/3/94)

Myth: A low-fat diet will make you "feel better . . . and increase your joy of living."

Truth: Low-fat diets are associated with increased rates of depression, psychological problems, fatigue, violence and suicide. (Lancet 3/21/92 v339)

Myth: To avoid heart disease, we should use margarine instead of butter.

Truth: Margarine eaters have twice the rate of heart disease as butter eaters. (Nutrition Week 3/22/91 21:12)

Myth: Americans do not consume enough essential fatty acids.

Truth: Americans consume far too much of one kind of EFA (omega-6 EFAs found in most polyunsaturated vegetable oils) but not enough of another kind of EFA (omega-3 EFAs found in fish, fish oils, eggs from properly fed chickens, dark green vegetables and herbs, and oils from certain seeds such as flax and chia, nuts such as walnuts and in small amounts in all whole grains.) (Am J Clin Nutr 1991 54:438-63)

Myth: A vegetarian diet will protect you against atherosclerosis.

Truth: The International Atherosclerosis Project found that vegetarians had just as much atherosclerosis as meat eaters. (Lab Invest 1968 18:498)

Myth: Low-fat diets prevent breast cancer.

Truth: A recent study found that women on very low-fat diets (less than 20%) had the same rate of breast cancer as women who consumed large amounts of fat. (NEJM 2/8/96)

Myth: The "cave man diet" was low in fat.

Truth: Throughout the world, primitive peoples sought out and consumed fat from fish and shellfish, water fowl, sea mammals, land birds, insects, reptiles, rodents, bears, dogs, pigs, cattle, sheep, goats, game, eggs, nuts and milk products. (Abrams, Food & Evolution 1987)

Myth: Coconut oil causes heart disease.

Truth: When coconut oil was fed as 7% of energy to patients recovering from heart attacks, the patients had greater improvement compared to untreated controls, and no difference compared to patents treated with corn or safflower oils. Populations that consume coconut oil have low rates of heart disease. Coconut oil may also be one of the most useful oils to prevent heart disease because of its antiviral and antimicrobial characteristics. (JAMA 1967 202:1119-1123; Am J Clin Nutr 1981 34:1552)

Myth: Saturated fats inhibit production of anti-inflammatory prostaglandins.

Truth: Saturated fats actually improve the production of all prostaglandins by facilitating the conversion of essential fatty acids. (Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation Journal 20:3)

Myth: Arachidonic acid in foods like liver, butter and egg yolks causes production of "bad" inflammatory prostaglandins.

Truth: Series 2 prostaglandins that the body makes from arachidonic acid both encourage and inhibit inflammation under appropriate circumstances. Arachidonic acid is vital for the function of the brain and nervous system. (Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation Journal 20:3)

Myth: Beef causes colon cancer

Truth: Argentina, with higher beef consumption, has lower rates of colon cancer than the US. Mormons have lower rates of colon cancer than vegetarian Seventh Day Adventists (Cancer Res 35:3513 1975)


Source: Weston A Price

More debunking...

"Conclusions Despite the contribution of dairy products to the saturated fatty acid composition of the diet, and given the diversity of dairy foods of widely differing composition, there is no clear evidence that dairy food consumption is consistently associated with a higher risk of CVD. Thus, recommendations to reduce dairy food consumption irrespective of the nature of the dairy product should be made with caution"

Source

Salad

2 Minute Salad from Mark Sisson on Vimeo.

Two articles to think about

From the Telegraph

From Time magazine...

Also read this....

From 3 men in a boat

I remember going to the British Museum one day to read up the treatment for some slight ailment of which I had a touch - hay fever, I fancy it was. I got down the book, and read all I came to read; and then, in an unthinking moment, I idly turned the leaves, and began to indolently study diseases, generally. I forget which was the first distemper I plunged into - some fearful, devastating scourge, I know - and, before I had glanced half down the list of "premonitory symptoms," it was borne in upon me that I had fairly got it.

I sat for awhile, frozen with horror; and then, in the listlessness of despair, I again turned over the pages. I came to typhoid fever - read the symptoms - discovered that I had typhoid fever, must have had it for months without knowing it - wondered what else I had got; turned up St. Vitus's Dance - found, as I expected, that I had that too, - began to get interested in my case, and determined to sift it to the bottom, and so started alphabetically - read up ague, and learnt that I was sickening for it, and that the acute stage would commence in about another fortnight. Bright's disease, I was relieved to find, I had only in a modified form, and, so far as that was concerned, I might live for years. Cholera I had, with severe complications; and diphtheria I seemed to have been born with. I plodded conscientiously through the twenty-six letters, and the only malady I could conclude I had not got was housemaid's knee.

I felt rather hurt about this at first; it seemed somehow to be a sort of slight. Why hadn't I got housemaid's knee? Why this invidious reservation? After a while, however, less grasping feelings prevailed. I reflected that I had every other known malady in the pharmacology, and I grew less selfish, and determined to do without housemaid's knee. Gout, in its most malignant stage, it would appear, had seized me without my being aware of it; and zymosis I had evidently been suffering with from boyhood. There were no more diseases after zymosis, so I concluded there was nothing else the matter with me.

I sat and pondered. I thought what an interesting case I must be from a medical point of view, what an acquisition I should be to a class! Students would have no need to "walk the hospitals," if they had me. I was a hospital in myself. All they need do would be to walk round me, and, after that, take their diploma.

Then I wondered how long I had to live. I tried to examine myself. I felt my pulse. I could not at first feel any pulse at all. Then, all of a sudden, it seemed to start off. I pulled out my watch and timed it. I made it a hundred and forty-seven to the minute. I tried to feel my heart. I could not feel my heart. It had stopped beating. I have since been induced to come to the opinion that it must have been there all the time, and must have been beating, but I cannot account for it. I patted myself all over my front, from what I call my waist up to my head, and I went a bit round each side, and a little way up the back. But I could not feel or hear anything. I tried to look at my tongue. I stuck it out as far as ever it would go, and I shut one eye, and tried to examine it with the other. I could only see the tip, and the only thing that I could gain from that was to feel more certain than before that I had scarlet fever.

I had walked into that reading-room a happy, healthy man. I crawled out a decrepit wreck.

I went to my medical man. He is an old chum of mine, and feels my pulse, and looks at my tongue, and talks about the weather, all for nothing, when I fancy I'm ill; so I thought I would do him a good turn by going to him now. "What a doctor wants," I said, "is practice. He shall have me. He will get more practice out of me than out of seventeen hundred of your ordinary, commonplace patients, with only one or two diseases each." So I went straight up and saw him, and he said:
"Well, what's the matter with you?"

I said:
"I will not take up your time, dear boy, with telling you what is the matter with me. Life is brief, and you might pass away before I had finished. But I will tell you what is NOT the matter with me. I have not got housemaid's knee. Why I have not got housemaid's knee, I cannot tell you; but the fact remains that I have not got it. Everything else, however, I HAVE got."

And I told him how I came to discover it all.

Then he opened me and looked down me, and clutched hold of my wrist, and then he hit me over the chest when I wasn't expecting it - a cowardly thing to do, I call it - and immediately afterwards butted me with the side of his head. After that, he sat down and wrote out a prescription, and folded it up and gave it me, and I put it in my pocket and went out.

I did not open it. I took it to the nearest chemist's, and handed it in. The man read it, and then handed it back.

He said he didn't keep it.

I said: "You are a chemist?"

He said: "I am a chemist. If I was a co-operative stores and family hotel combined, I might be able to oblige you. Being only a chemist hampers me."

I read the prescription. It ran:

"1 lb. beefsteak, with
1 pt. bitter beer every 6 hours.
1 ten-mile walk every morning.
1 bed at 11 sharp every night.
And don't stuff up your head with things you don't understand."
I followed the directions, with the happy result — speaking for myself — that my life was preserved, and is still going on.

Not everything is about fitness!

Some top websites...

Drop.io

drop.io

Drop.io is, put simply, the best file-sharing service we've seen. Just type in the URL you'd like to use, upload your files (up to 100MB), set a password and/or privacy setting, and choose how long the link should live (up to a year from the last page view). Sharing the files is then as easy as sending the URL around. There's no registration, no cost, and no limit to how many URLs you can use.

jott.com

jott.com

Jott is one of the coolest applications of speech to text technologies we have seen. Once you sign up for a free account, call Jott on your phone and you can leave a message that will be converted to text and posted on your blog, twitter speed or to-do list. The conversion is surprisingly accurate.

www.pageonce.com

www.pageonce.com

PageOnce collects your account info for just about any online account you might have and aggregates the info into a single page that looks good and is easy to keep track of. Keep tabs on your bank or investment accounts, see what's going on with your social-network profiles, check how many minutes you have left on your cell-phone plan, or even which Netflix movies are on the way.

purpletrail.com

purpletrail.com

This event-planning site will need to build a lot more momentum before it can challenge established services like Evite, or even the invite features built into Facebook and MySpace. But PurpleTrail has the features to give them a run for their money.

chimetv.com

chimetv.com

There are plenty of aggregated video sites, but Chime.TV pulls from the best (Break.com, Dailymotion, Veoh, and others) to make editor-created channels filled with stuff you'll love. The channels feature the latest episodes of shows like "Will It Blend?" and "Chad Vader", as well as channels for news, cute stuff, extreme sports, technology, and about 20 more -- including stuff from the network TV sites. It might seem a little odd when you could just visit the sites, but think of Chime.TV as the site that provides the constant background video comfort we use TVs for.

groupcard.com

www.groupcard.com

Group Card lets a group of people sign and send a free e-card, which works well for sharing a card with officemates, friends, or family members. The selection isn't much better than what you'd find in the card aisle at your local drugstore, but anything that saves us from spending $5 on a paper card is great with us.

someecards.com

www.someecards.com

Given our experience with greeting cards, both e- and real-world, it comes as quite a shock that one of the funniest sites on the Web is an e-card service. Browsing through the site's enormous collection of hilarious e-cards was enough to make us wish we had friends to send them to.

www.rulesofthumb.org

www.rulesofthumb.org


This helpful site presents user-submitted "rules of thumb," which the community can rate for their usefulness. Want to harness the collective wisdom on managing your money, finding the perfect mate, or getting rid of back pain? RulesofThumb is the place to be. Whether the collective wisdom is on target, however, is a call you'll have to make yourself.

play.typeracer.com

play.typeracer.com

Put your typing skills to the test with TypeRacer, which pits you against other players for the chance to win money, fame, and a slot on TypeRacer's leaderboard! (You actually get only one of those.)

YouTomb

youtomb.mit.edu

There are millions of videos up on YouTube, but thousands have also been removed, and not always with the owner's permission. If any footage online can be accused of copyright violation YouTube will take it down, whether or not the accusation was justified. YouTomb, a research project by the MIT Free Culture student group, tracks the top videos removed from the service for copyright violation, and retains the metadata about the videos so we, the public, can make our own decision about whether the removal was justified or not.

Atmospheric Optics

www.atoptics.co.uk

Atmospheric Optics is a stunning collection of pictures that illustrate the strange and beautiful visual phenomena created by light, weather, and our atmosphere. Check out photos and explanations for everything from rainbows and ice halos to nacreous clouds and anti-crepuscular rays.

organizedwisdom.com

organizedwisdom.com

Looking for answers to your health-related questions? OrganizedWisdom takes a different approach to search by offering search results in the form of "WisdomCards," curated topics pages with the info and links you need. Find the WisdomCard that corresponds to your question, and rest assured that the health advice is legit.

Criminal Searches

www.criminalsearches.com

Criminal Searches provides the scary-but-useful data on how many criminals live in your neighborhood, what crimes they were convicted of, and, in some cases, their names and personal info. It's all culled from public records, and is presented as a Google Maps mashup. You can restrict your search to sex offenders, search on a specific name to get a criminal history, or do a general search for criminals by city or ZIP code. This kind of data is certainly not for the faint of heart but can be useful in assessing the safety of your neighborhood.

www.damninteresting.com

www.damninteresting.com


Did you know it's quite possible that a severed head may actually feel pain for a while, post-separation? I think that's damn interesting, and so do the editors at Damn Interesting, enough to write an 1,100-word article about it. Their goal is to "collect and dispense damn interesting facts and ideas, whether they appeared in the past, the present, or the (anticipated) future." For example, did you know a supercollider was almost built under the plains of central Texas? Or that New York almost had a subway system based on pneumatic tubes? If you find that damn interesting, visit Damn Interesting.

www.howtocleanstuff.net

www.howtocleanstuff.net

Whatever you get dirty, this site can probably tell you how to clean it. Items include: dryers, white wall tires, LCD screens, paintings, golf balls, fake plants, cookies (the browser kind), furniture, venetian blinds, every kind of floor, and clothing (and specific kinds of spills, like Kool-Aid and gum), and pets and people. For example, there is a step-by-step on de-skunking both humans and dogs, neither of which involve that old wives' tale of tomato juice.

Love Food Hate Waste

www.lovefoodhatewaste.com

Even those who don't care about the ethics of food wasting are thinking thrifty, thanks to skyrocketing food prices. LoveFoodHateWaste pitches in with recipes that help you make use of food that might otherwise go bad. Need to use up some parsnips? Got some cottage cheese you'll never finish? Tell LFHW what you've got on hand, and the site suggests recipes that'll help you clean out your fridge and save money at the same time. We especially like the Rescue Recipes for foods that are already a bit past their best, like veggies that are "on the turn" or bread that's gotten a bit stale.

Songza

www.songza.com

Songza is a search engine that gives you easy access to streamable MP3s across the Web. Enter a song, artist, or both and Songza serves it up free of charge -- you can even build playlists. Where does all this free music come from? Best not to ask.

TheSixtyOne

www.thesixtyone.com

TheSixtyOne is one of our favorite places to discover new music. The Digg-like music-streaming service lets you vote songs up or down, and provides just the right amount of customizability. Those with adventurous musical tastes can listen to newly uploaded tracks, while mainstream listeners can stick to the tunes that have already risen to the top with lots of votes.

Catalog Choice

www.catalogchoice.org

Tired of your mailbox being stuffed with tons of annoying catalogs that you end up throwing away? Catalog Choice is a free service that lets you refuse catalogs you wish to no longer receive. The service cleans out your mailbox and saves a few trees at the same time.

wigix

www.wigix.com

Wigix exists for one reason: To give buyers and sellers a cheaper alternative to eBay. If you think eBay's fees are low enough as they are, then you've no need for Wigix. But if you're a disgruntled Power Seller or bidder, you might like its low fees and wealth of features like price histories and social-shopping options.

EveryScape.com

www.everyscape.com

The big online mapping services offer photograph-based street views that let you see what your destination looks like from the street, but newcomer EveryScape goes even further by letting you explore both the street view and the interiors of buildings, too. The service also helps users find hotels, restaurants, and popular tourist sites with reviews from Yelp.com. Photographers on the ground are shooting as many building interiors as they can as EveryScape continues to roll out to new cities.

Farecast

farecast.live.com

Plane ticket prices go up and down seemingly at random; you could buy a ticket today only to see the price sink (or spike) tomorrow. Farecast makes sense of it all by tracking pricing trends to let you know when it's time to pull the trigger. Enter in your travel dates, and Farecast will give you a pricing chart going back several weeks, along with a recommendation of whether to buy or wait.

InsideTrip.com

www.insidetrip.com

There are zillions of flight search engines that find the best flights for you based on travel dates, airports, and especially price. But InsideTrip takes it one step further by letting you add comfort level as a search parameter. Is legroom important to you? Aircraft type? Lost-bag or on-time percentages? InsideTrip has you covered.

Does Rodale think people interested in fitness are just idiots?

Apparently so!

Their latest lying email says this:

"Get the Body You've Always Wanted — In Just 28 Days!

J ust Published: The ONLY nutrition plan EXCLUSIVELY for men. Counted on by professional football and basketball teams, and backed by 142 medical and scientific studies, this plan is designed to help you use food to get the lean, well-muscled body you've always wanted, in just 28 days."

Note that:

JUST PUBLISHED.

"
The POWER FOOD Nutrition Plan is the first nutrition plan ever published exclusively for men by Men's Health. You get a fully customized nutrition plan that empowers you to reach your own specific goals: shed fat, build muscle, boost your performance, improve your strength and endurance, look and feel younger...even rev up your metabolism to transform your body into a fat-burning furnace while eating up to 6 meals a day. "

Here's the link


So - how much are Rodale charging for this just published book?

If I decide to keep the book, I'll pay for it in 4 installments of just $7.99 each, plus shipping and handling. Otherwise, I'll return the book at the end of the trial period and owe absolutely nothing.


Now have a look at this

Recommended retail price: $19.95

Published....THREE YEARS AGO

  • Paperback: 448 pages
  • Publisher: Rodale Books (May 30, 2006)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1594862354
  • ISBN-13: 978-1594862359
One review said:

"it has a lot of information but the diet menus are for only 185 lbs guys and there's no chart to calculate it for any other weight "

So buy from Rodale and you get a 'Just Published' book that is 3 years old....at a price that is 50% HIGHER than the recommended price and 150% higher than at Amazon!

RODALE : Six letters

RIP -OFF : Six letters

CON-MEN: Six letters






An easy way to make money in the fitness industry

Step 1: get a book that was published several years ago
Step 2: stress the word 'new' in the title
Step 3: design some advertisements
Step 4: Even though the CURRENT price is $21.95 and the Amazon price is much lower sell it for even more than the RRP - a huge 40% more than the RRP to your poor sad recipients of your emails!
Step 5: Then email people in the UK and charge $32 for something that is on Amazon UK for less than a tenner...

WHAT A RIP-OFF FROM RODALE

Here is just one of many crap reviews:

"Eight basic free weight exercises, one set each to failure, twice a week. Its about as effective as working out more. Why? Because overload, whether on the first set or the tenth set, is sufficient to stimulate muscle growth. Also the body takes a longer time to fully recover than people give it.

That paragraph covers the content of this book. The rest is a poorly written mix of fact and fiction filled with the following;

Useless anecodes of the sociopathic Arthur Jones insulting various people and making bizzare threats of violence. A quote from one of his lectures... "How would you feel if your were trapped on an island, and all of the inhabitants, apart from yourself, were retarded, malicious, chimpanzees? Don't laugh, because you are one of those retarded, malicious, chimpanzees."

Nostalgic musings about how the author and pals hung out on some ranch in speedo's and compared the roundness and firmness of their gluts... but in a man way.

Some instructions on how to do obscure exercises like... bench presses and barbell curls.

A ridiculous story about how a former marine, recruited to transform his body in just 66 days, loses 50 lbs of fat, and gains like 40 lbs of muscle. In nine weeks. Photos of him in his underwear too... one where he pushes his stomach out, and another where he sucks it in. These are called before and after photos of 50 lbs of weight loss. Then he apparently hits the roid's and injects his muscles with posing oil so that he can look real buff. This is called 30 lbs of muscle. It didn't look like it.

The author comments that this is more muscle than he has ever seen or heard of anyone building in such a short time. Ah.. but he cautions that this was a former marine, so that makes sense why he could gain so much. The author comments earlier that Arthur Jones, his mentor, said most body builders are so stupid they couldn't even spell the word 'muscle'.

He must think we are all retarded, malicious, chimpanzees to buy that story.

Pick another book on High Intensity Training. Any other book. "

And this is what the 2009 advertisement says about the 2005 book:

"
The New
High Intensity Training

will help you discover how to:

  • Benefit from the HIT philosophy- harder, but shorter, workouts

  • Determine your genetic potential to develop large muscles

  • Develop broader shoulders and a deeper chest in only 2 weeks.

  • Follow a quick-gain nutrition plan for boosting and supporting mass."

Hindu...

I must remember these:







Now this would be a real challenge!

I am sure that if some Trainer or other were to make this person a personal project - and made a huge success - then out of that would come all the usual:

a. cookbooks
b. exercise video (probably even get a government grant for this!)
c. routines for the gym
d. bodyweight routines
e. open air exercises
f. specific exercises
g. motivational encouragement
h. diet plans

You know, all the usual suite of tools.

All a Personal Trainer would have to do is go into partnership with this woman and, when successful, get government sponsorship to repeat the process with others.

It's a real business opportunity!!!!

Imagine the before and after pics!

Plus it would give this woman meaning to her life.

I am absolutely 100% convinced it would work - in fact if I had a few PT letters after my name and lived somewhere near her I would go and see her and talk through the business opportunity!

Seriously!

E-Book Market Blasphemy - by Dax Moy

I thought this was a very interesting article:

Can I ask you a question?

When was the last time you walked into Amazon, Barnes and Noble or even your local bookstore to buy a book?

Was it recently?

When you were browsing around reading the book-sleeve, did an attendant run up to you and say "Quick! There's only 2 left! Buy it before they go!"?

What about the last time you bought a book?

Did you hand over the book and the money only to find out that they'd thrown 18 other books, a CD collection, a bunch of book tokens, the author's telephone number and a money-off voucher to Starbucks in your bag?

No?

I wonder why that is?

I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that it's because bookstores generally value the works of each individual author and rely upon the fact that people are buying, say, a Stephen King novel because they actually like his work, value his craftsmanship actually WANT his book.

Nothing more, nothing less than that.

It's funny then, that in the internet publishing world we tend to do the exact opposite.

We tell people that 'There's only 4 left!' or that 'The price will go up at midnight... I can't guarantee the price!' or that 'Due to such high demand we'll be discontinuing the book but when we bring it back it'll be twice as expensive".

Worse still, we sell the book itself and then bundle it with a stack of bonuses so large that it would take 2 solid months of 8 hour days to get through them.. even if they wanted to!

(I recently looked at a product that had 103 'bonus' items attached to it!)

Excuse me, but this is just nuts!

I mean, seriously, what does it tell your prospect about you and your product?

1. That book is not good enough to be sold as a stand alone product.

If it were, it would be. That simple.

Borders doesn't give you 10 books as bonuses for the simple reason that each book on its shelves MUST be good enough to be there under its own merits and, that being the case, you should pay a fair price for it.

No ifs, no buts.

2. That you're not as confident of your materials as you should be.

If you were then you wouldn't want to bribe me with other stuff that, in many cases, doesn't support the primary offering.

And hey, if you're not confident then why should I be?

3. That you don't care whether or not I read your book.

If you really wanted me to read YOUR book and take what you're saying seriously, why on Earth would you want to distract me with 10 or more works from other people

Seriously, in this day and age the thing that people are most short on is time.

They want to be told what to do, how to do it and why in the shortest, quickest most concise way possible.

They don't want to read through War and Peace 10 times over from different people to figure out what they should be doing to get better abs or to lose weight.

In fact, they already get THAT kind of confusion for free on Google, so why should they pay YOU for adding even more?

4. That you want their money... BADLY!

What other message do you think people are getting when you say 'you can have this, and this, and this, and... oh yes, and don't forget this!'?

They're getting the message that for you it's all about the sale, nothing more, nothing less and that you'll keep bribing until they say 'yes'.

Now, the thing is, this has worked on the internet up until now but will it last?

Can it last?

Will we all find ourselves playing the 'He with the biggest pile of bonuses wins' game ad infinitum?

Will we see 500 bonus gift bundles in the not too distant future?

Who knows, but I hope not!

"But Dax, a lot of the 'big boys' have made a huge fortune this way... I want some of that"

Too true, over the years there has been some great money made from this approach but I don't think it'll last. I sincerely hope it doesn't!

You see, every one of these 'super bundles' just reinforces to the world at large that we're not 'real' authors.

They believe that we're 'just' e-book authors and that we're deserving of lesser status.

And, to be honest, most of the time they'd be right!

Yes, I know that much of this is coming off as marketing blasphemy but it's what I believe.

You may even think it's a bit rich coming from someone who's got e-books of his own but if you take a look at my own products you'll see that I offer no bonuses, no bribes and no slick sales techniques.

I simply offer what I'm selling in a (hopefully) captivating way and trust that those who want my books will buy and those that don't won't.

Yes, there are those who make far, far larger sales than I and yes, they use the bonus method to do so but I'm certain as certain can be that those days are coming to a close.

Regardless, the question is not just 'How many sales can I make?' but, 'what difference am I making when someone reads my book?'

If you're stealing precious time from them by loading them down with 15 books instead of just 1 good one, then are you really doing them a service?

Are you really making a difference?

The source of this article is here...it was written in Jan 2008.

The Calorie Delusion - does this explain obesity?

VERY IMPORTANT ARTICLE FROM THE NEW SCIENTIST

STANDING in line at the coffee shop you feel a little peckish. So what will you choose to keep you going until lunchtime? Will it be that scrumptious-looking chocolate brownie or perhaps a small, nut-based muesli bar. You check the labels: the brownie contains around 250 kilocalories (kcal), while the muesli bar contains more than 300. Surprised at the higher calorie count of what looks like the healthy option, you go for the brownie.

This is the kind of decision that people watching their weight - or even just keeping a casual eye on it - make every day. As long as we keep our calorie intake at around the recommended daily values of 2000 for women and 2500 for men, and get a good mix of nutrients, surely we can eat whatever we like?

This is broadly true; after all, maintaining a healthy weight is largely a matter of balancing calories in and calories out. Yet according to a small band of researchers, using the information on food labels to estimate calorie intake could be a very bad idea. They argue that calorie estimates on food labels are based on flawed and outdated science, and provide misleading information on how much energy your body will actually get from a food. Some food labels may over or underestimate this figure by as much as 25 per cent, enough to foil any diet, and over time even lead to obesity. As the western world's waistlines expand at an alarming rate, they argue, it is time consumers were told the true value of their food.

Calorie counts on food labels around the world are based on a system developed in the late 19th century by American chemist Wilbur Olin Atwater. Atwater calculated the energy content of various foods by burning small samples in controlled conditions and measuring the amount of energy released in the form of heat. To estimate the proportion of this raw energy that was used by the body, Atwater calculated the amount of energy lost as undigested food in faeces, and as chemical energy in the form of urea, ammonia and organic acids found in urine, and then he subtracted these figures from the total. Using this method, Atwater estimated that carbohydrates and protein provide an average of 4 kcal per gram, while fat provides 9 kcal per gram. With a few modifications, these measurements of what is known as metabolisable energy have been the currency of food ever since.

We know these values are approximate. Nutritionists are well aware that our bodies don't incinerate food, they digest it. And digestion - from chewing food to moving it through the gut and chemically breaking it down along the way - takes a different amount of energy for different foods. According to Geoffrey Livesey, an independent nutritionist based in Norfolk, UK, this can lower the number of calories your body extracts from a meal by anywhere between 5 and 25 per cent depending on the food eaten. "These energy costs are quite significant," he says, yet are not reflected on any food label.

Dietary fibre is one example. As well as being more resistant to mechanical and chemical digestion than other forms of carbohydrate, dietary fibre provides energy for gut microbes, and they take their cut before we get our share. Livesey has calculated that all these factors reduce the energy derived from dietary fibre by 25 per cent - down from the current estimate of 2 kcal per gram to 1.5 kcal per gram (The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, vol 51, p 617).

Similarly, the number of calories attributed to protein should be reduced from 4 kcal per gram to 3.2 kcal per gram, a 20 per cent decrease, Livesey says. That's because it takes energy to convert ammonia to urea when protein is broken down into its constituent amino acids (British Journal of Nutrition, vol 85, p 271).

Put into the context of real life, these relatively small errors may make a measurable difference. In the case of the brownie versus the muesli bar, the label will overestimate the calories derived from the fibre and protein-packed muesli bar, perhaps by enough to make it lower in calories than the brownie. Just 20 kcal per day more than you need can add up to roughly a kilogram of fat over a year.

Just 20 kcal per day more than you need can add up to roughly a kilogram of fat over a year

Errors in the Atwater factors for protein and fibre are just one reason why the brownie may pack more of a calorific punch than the label suggests. The brownie will be much softer in texture than the nut-bar, a factor that is known to lower the energy cost of digestion. In a study published in 2003, for example, a team led by Kyoko Oka at Kyushu University in Fukuoka, Japan, investigated the effect of food texture on weight gain. They fed one group of rats their usual hard food pellets, while a second group received a softer version. Both pellets had exactly the same calorie content and flavour. The only difference was that softer ones were easier to chew. After 22 weeks, the rats on the soft food diet were obese and had more abdominal fat. "Food texture might be as important a factor for preventing obesity as taste or food nutrients," Oka and his colleagues concluded (Journal of Dental Research, vol 82, p 491).

A similar study in people had comparable results. Kentaro Murakami and Satoshi Sasaki, both at the University of Tokyo in Japan, surveyed 450 female students about their eating habits and then classified the food they ate according to how difficult it was to chew. They found that women who ate the hardest foods had significantly slimmer waistlines than those who ate the softest foods (American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, vol 86, p206).

What's more, the brownie is made from refined sugar and flour, making it easier for our bodies to extract the available calories than it would be from the complex carbohydrates of the oatmeal in the cereal bar. And while the Atwater system assumes that the proportion of food that passes through the gut undigested is more or less constant, at around 10 per cent, we have known for more than 60 years that this is not the case. Thirty per cent or more of coarse-ground wheat flour may be excreted, while today's finely milled flours may be almost completely digested. As a result, foods made from these fine flours - like that brownie - are likely to channel practically all of the energy from carbohydrate into the body.

Cooking, too, can affect how many calories the body gets from foods, another factor the Atwater system ignores, says Richard Wrangham, a biological anthropologist at Harvard University. Wrangham became interested in the impact of food processing on calorie availability as part of his work into how cooking affected human evolution. In his recently published book Catching Fire: How cooking made us human, Wrangham suggests that the advent of cooking propelled our ancestors onto the evolutionary fast track, by providing more energy to invest in growing bigger brains.

"Cooking gives food energy," says Wrangham. It alters the structure of the food at the molecular level, making it easier for our body to break it up and extract the nutrients.

In plants, for example, much of the energy from starch is stored as amylopectin, which is semi-crystalline, does not dissolve in water, and cannot be easily digested. Heat starchy foods with water, though, and the crystalline forms begin to melt. The starch granules absorb water, swell, and eventually burst. The amylopectin is shattered into short starch molecules called amylose, which are easily digested by the enzyme amylase.

Cooking also makes meat more digestible. Proteins are like origami - complex, folded, three-dimensional structures that stomach acids and enzymes can't easily access. Heat unfolds the proteins, exposing them to enzymes that chop up the amino acids so they can be recycled into proteins the body needs.

To explore how much cooking ramps up the caloric potential of food, Wrangham teamed up with Stephen Secor, an expert in the physiology of digestion at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. Secor tested the impact of cooking and grinding food on the ability of Burmese pythons to digest and absorb the nutrients. Pythons may sound like a strange choice, but they are useful models for studying digestion because they remain motionless for days after eating, making it easy to link changes in metabolism to the food they have eaten.

Secor fed the snakes one of four options: intact raw steak, intact cooked steak, ground raw steak or ground cooked steak. He found that cooking or grinding the meat reduced the cost of digestion by 12.7 per cent and 12.4 per cent respectively. When he fed the pythons steak that had been both ground and cooked, the combination lowered the amount of energy needed to digest the meal by 23.4 per cent.

"That's a significant decrease in the cost of digestion," says Secor. "It means that there are that many more calories that can be allocated to other activities, like glucose or fat storage."

In other experiments Secor tested the energy differences between cooked and raw carrots when fed to bearded dragons. Unlike pythons these lizards are omnivorous, which makes it possible to test the response of the digestive system when raised on a strictly herbivorous, carnivorous or omnivorous diet. By counting the number of chews the dragons took before swallowing the food, his preliminary findings suggest that the cooked carrots require only about half as many chews as the raw vegetable, which corresponds to more than a 40 per cent drop in the energy needed to chew.

A handful of human studies supports what has been discovered in animals. In the late 1990s, Pieter Evenepoel, now at University Hospital Leuven, in Belgium, labelled egg protein with radioactive isotopes and tracked it as it passed through the digestive tracts of human volunteers. One experiment involved giving 25 grams of cooked egg protein to five volunteers who had undergone an ileostomy, in which a loop of the small intestine is brought to the surface and faeces are collected in a bag. Later they gave the patients the same meal but this time the egg was raw. After the meals, the contents of the bag and the breath of the patients were examined for labelled nitrogen and carbon - the remnants of the digested protein. They found that 90 per cent of the cooked egg was digested compared to just 51 per cent of the raw egg (The Journal of Nutrition, vol 128, p 1716).

Yet despite these large variations in how much energy the body has at its disposal either to use or store, none of this is reflected in the food labelling system, which some say leaves the consumer in the dark about their dietary choices. "It's difficult to produce a meaningful, accurate estimate of the impact of food processing, so people have simply pushed that question aside... so far aside that most people in the public aren't even aware of it," says Wrangham.

So if food labels are giving consumers a potentially misleading picture of their dietary choices, what should be done about it?

For many nutritionists, the answer is nothing. While they acknowledge that the current system isn't perfect, many argue that sticking with the Atwater system makes it easy to calculate a ballpark calorie count. They also say that overhauling such a widely used system would require a huge amount of research in both animal models and human volunteers, plus a more complicated labelling system than consumers are used to, for little real public health benefit. "There will be errors, but not very serious errors, and nobody can do their calories anyway so what difference does it make?" says Marion Nestle, a nutritionist at New York University.

Calorie recount

Indeed, back in 2002, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) assembled an international group of nutritionists, including Livesey, to investigate the possibility of recommending a change to food labelling standards to reflect the cost of digestion. The group, with the exception of Livesey, decided to stick with metabolisable energy for calculating nutrition labels on food products because, the report concluded, "the problems and burdens ensuing from such a change would appear to outweigh by far the benefits".

"We believe that metabolisable energy is a more accurate representation of what's in that food for everybody [and is] more accurate for the purposes of food labelling," says Janis Baines, a nutritionist at the regulatory agency Food Standards Australia New Zealand, in Canberra, who supports the FAO's decision.

Livesey, however, is convinced that the Atwater system needs to be revised to take into account the energy used to digest different foods - to provide updated values for protein and dietary fibre that reflect the cost of digestion.

Wrangham agrees, and suggests that in addition to making calorie counts more accurate for different foods, there could be a system describing roughly how many calories would be gained if you cooked a particular food in different ways. A steak, for example, may provide more available calories per serving if cooked well done, than if done medium-rare or served raw.

Even Livesey would not expect these adjustments to solve the obesity crisis, at least not on their own. Nevertheless, he believes correcting food labels to reflect the latest science will give the diet-conscious consumer the information they need to make the best kinds of dietary choices based on the latest scientific understanding of digestion. "The public should be able to apply the science," he says. "[And] if you're not following the science you're following something else".

Bijal Trivedi is a freelance science writer based in Washington DC

600 muscles

Much is written about exercising your 600 muscles etc.

But WHAT exercises?

Take press-ups. Do they exercise many/any muscles below the knee? The feet? What about squats. How do they exercise muscles above the waist? the neck? And lunges? How do they exercise the arms?

Any ideas please?

An email from Dax...

Well, I've been running around like a headless chicken for the last
3 weeks with my Look Great Naked Challengers, My 30-in-30 group and
my new courses and seminars taking up all my time but boy, has it
been worth it!

The results my groups are getting right now are nothing short of
amazing!

Leading the field in the 30 in 30 'race' (not a race at all really,
they're all on their own journey) is Liz Roddis who has lost 19lbs
in 21 days (read her blog here -
http://my30lbin30dayschallenge.blogspot.com/)
but all of the other challengers are doing amazing too and showing
just what can be accomplished when you put your mind to it.

But it's not just the weight, people are losing INCHES like crazy
with many of them reporting that AFTER LESS THAN 3 WEEKS they are
now fitting into clothes that they haven't been able to wear for
years.

Great huh?

Could you imagine giving your body a COMPLETE overhaul in 3 weeks
or less? (Would be pretty cool to get yourself in shape in time for
the summer, right?

What about if you could do it for free?

More interested?

Well, here's the thing.

I've just taken on some brand new interns at my Islington studios in
London, UK and I need to give them a crash course in getting people
into great shape fast.

So...

I'm looking for 12 people.

Just 12, who are willing to pull out all the stops and work with my
guys to get great results over the next 3 weeks. They'll give you
great results and you'll be giving them experience and great
testimonials when they help you shape up faster than ever before.

But we're not looking for freebie-seekers XXXXXXXXXX. We don't
want people who are ONLY doing this because it's free. We want
people who are 100% committed to changing how they look and feel about
their body in super-quick time and who, if they love the results they get would
be prepared to stay with their coaches to get even greater results.

In effect, we're giving it free because we hope you'll love the
results so much that you'll stay on with us and pay for the
services (it's important that we're honest and upfront with you. This IS a
business after all!).

But either way it's win-win. My team get new experience, you get
resultsand you only ever have to pay us money if you LOVE your
results so much that you stay on beyond the 3 weeks.

Sound ok to you?

If it DOES then pick up the phone RIGHT NOW and call my Islington
studio on 0207 354 3550 and book a free consultation before we fill
the 12 slots. (Last time that took about 11 minutes!)

This is a great opportunity tom, so don't miss out. Pick
up the phone.

But hey, what if you're not living near London?

No problem!

I'm reactivating my FREE 9 day trial of my Look Great Naked
challenge for a limited period allowing you to try for free what thousands of
people have paid serious money for (LGN sells for over $200).

Just go to http://www.daxmoy-pts.co.uk/9daylgn.htm and put your
name and email address in the box and you'll be guided through the first 9
days of the program including workouts, diet, videos etc for no cost at
all.

There's nothing to buy.

Use it as my guest and enjoy!

Just promise me you'll tell me how you get on with the program ok?

Well, this has been a LONG email and I'm aware of how valuable your
time is so I'll let you go.

Just make sure you take advantage of these free offers ok, XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Madness not to! : )

Truth, joy and love

Dax Moy
http://www.mylondonpersonaltrainer.com

Only two...?

Only found two males on the Dax Moy Challenge:

One

Two


Which is a pity as though I am only following a 'similar' diet and not the same workouts, it's nice to be able to compare. Helps you along etc.

Are there no more male bloggers out there following Dax's programme (or anyone else's for that matter?)

I wonder how his challenge is different to this:



"Want To Achieve A Fit, Firm & Fat Free Body From The Comfort Of Your Own Home In Less Than 30 Minutes A Day?"

The exercise regime was very different....

Book reading

I have decided to read this today....have a copy for free....

If anyone knows how I can upload e-books to the blog, please post and I'll put up more freebies....

Here's what I have...

One

Loads more

Two

Three


Must go or I will be infringing this...

My Own Challenge

There seems to be a bit of hostility directed towards me owing to comments/posts made. That was never my intention.

Dax asked me about whether I would be setting myself a 30 day challenge.

I have designed my own challenge, at last. I don't want it to be just external or just physical. I have chosen 20 targets, incorporating the Elimination Diet, yes but also other targets.

It starts in 20 minutes....

If you wish to follow progress/pass comment/voice encouragement then you are more than welcome to do so.

Given that one of the targets is to reduce internet time this blog will now have fewer postings.

We'll see what the 30 days can bring....

Please visit my new blog....

Until August then....(except for occasional posts)

Your diet and global warming.

I could have titled this: 'Fitness and survival' - in effect it reaches the same conclusion.

Please read this extract from Steve's blog:

"To produce one pound of meat requires, on average, about 5000 gallons of water. Compare that to 25 gallons for a pound of wheat. A vegetarian needs 300 gallons of water per day, while a typical meat-eater needs 4000 gallons. It takes energy to transport all that water too, and this means more greenhouse gas emissions.

Then you have to feed the animal. The vast majority of commercially grown animals don’t just roam around grazing on grass. Most animals eat a lot of grain. This requires fields to grow the grain, fertilizers, and lots and lots of water. It also requires transporting and refining the grain, often over vast distances. Growing grain requires tilling the soil, crop dusting, transporting the grain in gas-guzzling trucks, running feed mills, and transporting it to the factory farms.

Then there are the hormones and antibiotics the food animals are injected with. It takes resources to manufacture, transport, and administer those too.

Moreover, you have to transport the animals too. They have to be trucked to the slaughterhouse — more fuel. It takes energy to operate the slaughterhouse. Then the animal flesh is taken to processing plants — more fuel. Those plants require energy and maintenance to operate as well. Then the meat has to be trucked to grocery stores — more fuel. Then it has to be frozen or refrigerated — more energy. Every step in this lengthy process consumes massive energy and causes enormous pollution.

And this is what we get when everything is working properly. When it goes awry and there’s a problem like a mass recall of contaminated meet, all of this energy is wasted completely, and even more energy and pollution are required to conduct the recall."

Now visit his blog and read the rest.

It makes sense doesn't it?

If we're going to change - as with Dax's clients - a simple way is to try it for 30 days - but try what?

Check this out for some ideas.

I am going to start a 30-day blog with all the things I want to try...for 30 days. I'll see how I do....



Strong Lifts . com

I came across stronglifts.com - and I really like it - so here's a plug...

StrongLifts.com contains hundreds blog posts and thousands forum posts. Here’s how to find information quickly on this site.
  1. Free eBook. Quick, complete guide that will help you build muscle & lose fat through strength training. StrongLifts.com’s eBook is free and counts 57 pages. To get your free copy, click here.
  2. Blog. New posts appear on StrongLifts.com Blog in reverse chronological order. Get new posts delivered to you for free by subscribing by email or RSS. Each post has share, print & email options at the bottom.
  3. Best of. The best posts of StrongLifts.com are accessible from the left sidebar. Examples: StrongLifts 5×5, How to Build Muscle, How to Gain Weight for Skinny Guys, How to Lose Fat, etc
  4. Archive. All posts published since May 2007 & organized by month are available in StrongLifts.com Archive. Check the sitemap for a similar list but with the posts ordered by category.
  5. Forum. Connect with like minded people, ask for advice, get motivated by reading the training logs of other members and start one too. Click here to register to StrongLifts.com Forum for free.
  6. Search. Type what you’re looking for in the search form in the top right corner of the blog. The search function will give you relevant posts from StrongLifts.com Blog & StrongLifts.com Forum.

Four ways to eliminate back pain

The below is all stolen from here...

1. Stretch your hip-flexors. It’s kind of counter-intuitive to think that your hip flexors (the muscles at the front of your hip responsible for bringing your knee up to your chest or to fold you forward like in a bow) would actually come into play here, but it’s true. The major hip flexor, your psoas, actually originates at your lower back, swings around the front of you and then attaches at your femur (your thigh bone). Having a tight psoas will pull your pelvis into “anterior pelvic tilt” which is just a fancy way of saying you’ll have an excessive arch in your lower back (so stop the sit-ups already). This will force your gut out, shut your abs down and tighten up all those low back muscles that are responsible for keeping your low back strong (the erector muscle group). Bottom line - stretch your hip flexors to keep you from getting that excessive arch. And if you work at a desk all day, get up and go for a walk or to stretch every now and then.




2. Make sure your butt works. This kind of goes hand-in-hand with point #1. If you sit too much, if you run on the treadmill, if all the activity you get during the day is the walk from the car in the parking lot to the desk in your office, then I’ll bet that you have inactive glutes (your rear end). If your butt is able to “fire” in the right sequence, that means that your hamstrings and low back are not being overworked. It means that all the muscles in the “chain of command” are doing their job. One of the best exercises you can do to make sure your butt fires is the Cook Hip Lift. Simply lay on your back with your knees bent and your feet flat on the ground. Now take your right knee and hug it into your chest. Brace your abs and lift your hips in the air by pushing your left foot into the ground. With good practice, you should be able to extend your hip so that you create a “bow” from your shoulder to your knee. (see picture) Do this exercise prior to your workout to get your glutes working properly. One or 2 sets of 15 repetitions per side should do the trick.


3. Learn how to BRACE. Probably the most important technique that I’ve learned and taught in my fitness career is how to BRACE MY ABS. You will use this technique ALWAYS - when you’re sprinting, when you’re squatting, when you’re picking your son/daughter off the ground, while you’re moving furniture around the house. If you really want to strengthen your back, then learn this technique and your back will be bullet-proof in no time. To brace, stand up nice and tall with good posture. Now, you want to imagine that you’re about to take a punch in the midsection. What would you do if someone was about to give you a swift shot to your torso? Now hold that contraction, but breathe normally (it’s important to recognize that breathing and bracing are separate functions). Now remember that feeling and use it to make your back bullet-proof.

4. Work your abs the right way. I do the following ab circuit (video below) EVERY NIGHT before bed and it had made a world of difference in my life. When you’re doing it at the top level, it will take no longer than 12 minutes. If you’re just starting out, it will take you 5 minutes. Five minutes isn’t a very big investment of your time for a lifetime without back pain, so I suggest you incorporate this circuit into your routine.

Blood tests

"I received an email yesterday asking me about blood tests following my comment about pre-exercise programme blood tests.

You could do worse than follow the advice of the Life Extension Foundation who say:

"
The Life Extension Foundation suggests that a basic battery of tests be performed annually. The recommended male panel consists of a complete blood count (CBC)/chemistry test, homocysteine, free testosterone, estradiol, prostate-specific antigen (PSA), and DHEA. The recommended female panel consists of the CBC/chemistry test, estradiol, progesterone, free testosterone, DHEA, and homocysteine. In addition to these special male and female panels, the following tests are especially important for men and women over age 40: fasting insulin, fibrinogen, thyroid stimulating hormone (TSH), and free triiodothyroxine (T3). If a serious abnormality is detected—such as elevated blood glucose (sugar), hormone imbalance, or high cholesterol—testing should be repeated more often than annually to determine the benefits of any therapy you are using to correct the potentially life-shortening abnormality..."

However, in the UK you cannot easily get homocysteine, free testosterone and DHEA test
s.Instead you'll have to be satisfied with:

Cholesterol (three measurements)
Triglycerides
Blood pressure
C-reactive protein

So the best thing is to see a specialist i.e. your Doctor and ask for a full blood screening. (In the UK it is free on the NHS). But also read widely and go prepared!


Also ask yourself some questions:

  • Has your doctor ever said that you have a heart condition and that you should only do exercise recommended by a doctor?
  • Do you feel pain in your chest when you perform physical activity?
  • In the past month, have you had chest pain when you were not performing any physical activity?
  • Do you lose your balance because of dizziness or do you ever lose consciousness?
  • Do you have a bone or joint problem that could be made worse by a change in your physical activity?
  • Is your doctor currently prescribing any medication for your blood pressure or for a heart condition?
  • Do you know of any other reason why you should not engage in physical activity?

Also ask yourself these medical questions:

  • Is there a history of heart trouble in your family?
  • Do you have high blood pressure, high blood cholesterol, or any breathing problems?
  • Do you have bone or joint difficulty?
  • Do you smoke?
  • Are you obese?
  • Are you over the age of 45 if you are a man or 55 if you are a woman?
  • Are you diabetic?
  • Are you pregnant?
  • Do you have a hernia or any other condition that could be made worse by lifting weights?
  • Have you had surgery within a year?

Whatever the answers go and see your doctor!

There are other tests you could do - here's one from Dax.

As far as dieting goes, many visitors here are following Dax's Elimination Diet. To be totally accurate though, metabolic typing is needed - and not the one mass marketed by Woolcott etc, but this one.

Anyway, before exercise programme in addition to various external measurements, do INTERNAL measurements i.e. blood tests.

I am going for mine tomorrow!