Isegoria

Clayton and Rowbotham look at how the mid-Victorians worked, ate and died — which was surprisingly well, really:

Analysis of the mid-Victorian period in the U.K. reveals that life expectancy at age 5 was as good or better than exists today, and the incidence of degenerative disease was 10% of ours. Their levels of physical activity and hence calorific intakes were approximately twice ours. They had relatively little access to alcohol and tobacco; and due to their correspondingly high intake of fruits, whole grains, oily fish and vegetables, they consumed levels of micro- and phytonutrients at approximately ten times the levels considered normal today.

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Given that modern pharmaceutical, surgical, anaesthetic, scanning and other diagnostic technologies were self-evidently unavailable to the mid-Victorians, their high life expectancy is very striking, and can only have been due to their health-promoting lifestyle. But the implications of this new understanding of the mid-Victorian period are rather more profound. It shows that medical advances allied to the pharmaceutical industry’s output have done little more than change the manner of our dying. The Victorians died rapidly of infection and/or trauma, whereas we die slowly of degenerative disease. It reveals that with the exception of family planning, the vast edifice of twentieth century healthcare has not enabled us to live longer but has in the main merely supplied methods of suppressing the symptoms of degenerative diseases which have emerged due to our failure to maintain mid-Victorian nutritional standards.

Examine.com has compiled a database of research papers on nutritional supplements and produced a Human Effect Matrix:

For every supplement in our database, a handy table will tell you what effect each supplement has and how noticeable that effect is.

Does Supplement X help with Y? Now you’ll know.

Creatine? It has a minor effect in increasing your testosterone, but a strong effect in increasing your power output. What about fish oil? It has actually has a notable effect in decreasing depression!

Best of all, the Human Effect Matrix isn’t on the supplement pages only. They are also on the effect pages themselves. Want to know which supplements impact inflammation? Done! Do any supplements help you add muscle? Now you know. (Spoiler: they all have, at most, a minor effect).

What we’ve done is removed all the mysticism, hyperbole, and marketing-speak used to talk about supplements. It’s all tabulated and organized for your perusal, and it’s all backed with citations with human-studies.

To get you going, here are a few popular and a few interesting supplements:

• Creatine
• Vitamin D
• Fish Oil
• Berberine
• Spirulina

Endocrinologist Jeffrey S. Brown has successfully treated a number of patients for hypothyroidism — patients who were extremely healthy Olympic athletes:

On the wall of the medical office of Jeffrey S. Brown is a photograph of Carl Lewis, the nine-time Olympic gold medalist. Lewis is one of several former or current patients of Brown’s who have climbed the Olympic podium, including Galen Rupp, who won a silver medal in the 10,000 meters at the London Olympics.

“The patients I’ve treated have won 15 Olympic gold medals,” said Brown.

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The medication typically prescribed for hypothyroid is a synthetic thyroid hormone known generically as levothyroxine. That drug is not a banned substance by the World Anti-Doping Agency and by all accounts has never been shown to enhance performance. Taking it requires no disclosure, and no permission from antidoping authorities.

In the early 1960s Dr. John Ziegler introduced the ultimate strength exercise, and Bob Hoffman, owner of York Barbell and Strength and Health magazine, promoted it. It was called functional isometric contraction:

While very few sports coaches or athletic directors in high schools and colleges approved of lifting weights, they embraced the isometric system wholeheartedly. What the school administrators and coaches liked about isometric training was it was neat, no plates to store or pick up after, safe, and quick. An entire football team of forty players could go through a workout in a half and hour. Sometimes even less than that.

Power racks sprung up everywhere.

York Barbell sold metal and wood power racks — but Hoffman discontinued the wood version, once he realized people were using them to make copies.

In Strength and Health, Hoffman touted the progress made by 23-year-old Bill March:

Bill weighed 176 and had won the 1960 Middle Atlantic Title with a three-lift  [press, snatch, clean & jerk] total of 745.

Bill was the poster boy for isometric training. His lifts climbed steadily at a pace that few could believe. He blew past an 800 total and kept right on going. He moved up to the 198-lb. class and started winning everything in sight. No one had ever seen anyone make such startling improvement in so short a period of time. At the ’63 Philly Open, Bill pressed 354 to set a world record in the middleheavyweight class. Hoffman couldn’t manufacture power racks fast enough to keep up with the demand.

Fast forward six years. Isometrics and also the combination of isotonics and isometrics had all but disappeared from strength training in sports.

How did isometrics become known as a fraud and a farce? Well, young Bill March’s regimen included some other potent elements that didn’t get as much coverage as his power-rack routine.

It all started back in 1954, when Dr. John Ziegler followed the United States Olympic Weightlifting team to the World Championships in Vienna as their team physician and learned a few secrets from the Russians:

During one of the drinking bouts, well past midnight, the Russians’ tongues began to loosen up and Doc knew the right questions to ask. Ziegler learned that the lifters were experimenting with strength-enhancing drugs and also using a form of exercise that helped make them stronger by exerting maximum pressure against a bar in a fixed position.

Back home in Olney, Ziegler began scanning the research, something he enjoyed. He came across enough pure research to convince him that the concept of isometric training could produce results and put together a program which he used on himself in his well-equipped home gym next to his house and office. He also built the first power rack that would be the prototype for the Super Power Rack that Hoffman would sell later on. He pitched his idea to Hoffman, but Bob wasn’t interested. What Ziegler was proposing was too close to the dynamic tension system that Charles Atlas and George Jowett had made a living on for a good many years. Bob had been speaking out against dynamic tension ever since he had taken over Strength and Health magazine. He saw no way to make money on isometrics at that time.

Meanwhile, Ziegler dug around in yet more research and came up with a formula to make a drug that would help build muscle and attachment tissue. This was to be used to help rehabilitate burn patients or those who had been bed-ridden for a long time. His specialty was physical rehabilitation, and he believed he had a miracle drug in the making. He took his idea to CIBA Pharmaceuticals. They quickly saw the value of such a drug, and in 1960 produced a little pink pill called Dianabol (the color was later changed to blue for some reason I can’t determine).

Again, Ziegler tested the drug on himself and used isometrics at the same time. Within a few months, he knew he was onto something big and once again approached Hoffman. Ziegler wanted to try his new drug and new form of training on a young Olympic lifter

For several years, Hoffman had resisted Ziegler’s overtures about marketing isometrics through S&H. Then, in 1959 a renowned authority in the field of kinesiology and applied anatomy, Dr. C. H. McCloy of Iowa State University, submitted a study for publication. The study showed that non-apparatus exercise done in an isometric fashion led to marked increases in strength. This was the exact same thing that Ziegler had been telling him for several years.

There were two things that motivated Hoffman: greed, and an almost obsessive hatred of Joe Weider. This isometric idea was going to take off, and if he lollygagged any longer Joe was going to jump in and make it his own. And since both Ziegler and McCloy had noted that isometrics were not only useful to athletes in a wide variety of sports, and for competitive weightlifters, they were equally as beneficial to bodybuilders. He let Ziegler know he was ready to sponsor the testing of the isometric program and also the strength-enhancing drug. In the meantime, he set about ordering a shit-load of power racks to be made at his foundry.

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Doc would put March through his workout and give him his daily dose of Dianabol, one tablet for two weeks, two for two weeks, and four for two more weeks. He never gave Bill a prescription for the drug. In fact, I never knew anyone who got a script for any drug from Ziegler. He was extremely conservative about handing out medication and knew that an athlete would always cheat to some degree. Their highly competitive personalities would prompt them to take more and more to achieve the success they were seeking. So Bill went through an isometric workout five times a week and did the three lifts plus squats on Saturday at the York Gym. His progress came fast and often until he was one of the best in the world in a matter of only a few years.

Doc Ziegler improved his isometric routine into a new and improved isotonic-isometric system, but once everyone found out about Dianabol, it didn’t really matter. By the mid-1960s, average lifters were making superhuman gains, regardless of what routine they chose.

The benefits of music seem most pronounced during low-to-moderate-intensity exercise:

A study published last year in the Journal of Sports Medicine and Physical Fitness found that cyclists who synchronized their movements to music reduced oxygen uptake by as much as 7%. The study tested three different musical tempos on 10 men who cycled for 12 minutes at 70% maximal heart rate.

Another experiment, involving 30 people walking on treadmills, found that exercising at the same tempo as the music boosted endurance. One group of participants walked with motivational music, another with neutral music and a third with no music. Endurance increased in both groups listening to music, although the motivational music had the greatest effect. The study was published in the Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology in 2009.

Experts say most of the benefits of working out to music come from psychological factors. “When people run with music their rate of perceived exertion is lower than if they don’t use music or other devices,” says Gershon Tenenbaum, director of the graduate program in sport and exercise psychology at Florida State University. These benefits tend to evaporate once a person begins exercising at very intense levels, he says.

Dr. Tenenbaum says similar benefits have been observed when athletes are told to imagine they are in a certain location, such as at the beach, or are exposed to particular smells, such as lavender.

David-Lee Priest, a researcher at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, says music is able to divert attention through a neurological mechanism. The unpleasant feedback from exercising, such as difficulty breathing, sweating or stiff muscles, is transferred to the brain using the afferent, or sensory, nervous system. Listening to music interferes with the transmission of those sensations, he says. “Before you become aware of the fatigue the music will block out the sensations of fatigue and effort so you won’t fully notice them,” he says. That blocking occurs only up to a point — about 70% of one’s maximum capacity, he says.

With resistance training, the benefit of music occurs more before one starts exercising or in between sets, Dr. Priest says. “It’s like taking a mild stimulant.…It will increase your heart rate and blood pressure slightly.”

In a recent study, Dr. Karageorghis and colleagues tested the effects of music on swimmers. After three weeks in which the athletes got used to swimming with ear buds, the researchers conducted three experiments using 26 collegiate swimmers who completed the 200-meter freestyle trials. They listened to motivational music, neutral music and no music. Both music groups saw a three-second improvement in performance compared to their race times without music. Although this represented just a 2% improvement, Dr. Karageorghis says it’s enough to make a difference in the realm of competitive swimming.

It’s no secret that men run faster than women, but these two tables from Paediatric Exercise Science and Medicine demonstrate just how much faster young men are than young women:

In a 50-meter sprint, the average time for an 18-year-old guy is 7.3 seconds (±0.5 s), while the average time for an 18-year-old girl is 9.1 seconds (±0.7 s).

One girl in ten can run 50 meters in 8.2 seconds, which is fast enough to put a guy below the 5th percentile.

One girl in a hundred can run 50 meters in 7.6 seconds, which is fast enough to put a boy in the 25th percentile.

So, the number of girls who can run as fast as the average guy is roughly zero.

It didn’t realize it was that extreme.

We think of people as having traits, Peter Turchin says, when we need to realize that people have different traits at different ages:

Because abilities to do something at the age of 10, 30, 50, etc. are separate (even if correlated) traits, they evolve relatively independently of each other. When grains became a large part of the diet, the ability of children to digest them (and detoxify the chemical compounds plants put into seeds to protect them against predators such as us) became critical. If you don’t have genes to help you deal with this new diet, you don’t survive to adulthood and don’t leave descendants. In other words, evolution worked very hard to adapt the young to the new diet. On the other hand, the intensity of selection on the old (e.g., 55 years old) was much less – in large part, because most people did not live to the age of 55 until very recently. Additionally, once an animal gets past its reproductive age, the evolution largely ceases to have an effect (in humans, presence of older individuals was somewhat important for the survival of their genes in their children and grandchildren, so evolution did not entirely cease, but was greatly slowed down).

What this means is that evolution caused rapid proliferation of genes that enabled children and young adults to easily digest novel foods and detoxify whatever harmful substances were in them. Genes and gene combinations that did the same for older people also increased, but at a much, much slower rate. This may sound puzzling – if we have the detoxifying genes that work for young adults, why shouldn’t they work for older adults? The reason is that one gene-one action model is wrong; it’s not how our bodies work. Most functions are regulated not by a single gene, but by whole networks of them. As we age, some genes come on, and others go off, and the network changes, often in very subtle and nonlinear ways. That’s why we need the ‘trick’ with which I started, to consider functions at different ages as separate traits. During the last 10,000 years evolution worked very hard to optimize the gene network operating during earlier ages to deal with novel foods. But the gene network during later ages was under much less selection to become optimized in this way.

The striking conclusion from this argument is that older people, even those coming from populations that have practiced agriculture for millennia, may suffer adverse health effects from the agricultural diet, despite having no problems when they were younger.

Fat is associated with health problems, but it may not be the cause of those problems. Fat may be a defense mechanism against unhealthy eating:

If merely the amount of excess fat is the direct cause of metabolic dysregulation then removing that fat through surgery should obviously result in metabolic improvement. Unfortunately, this is not the case. In fact, an excellent prior study has shown that liposuction does not make obese individuals healthy.

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Obese individuals with metabolic problems who are prescribed a class of drugs called thiazolidinediones or TZDs for short, actually grow more fat cells, get fatter, but also get healthier.

Currently, the emerging theory of why obesity is associated with metabolic disease risk suggests that it is not the excess amount of fat that results in problems – but rather, it is the inability of the fat tissue (specifically subcutaneous) to expand enough via the development of numerous, healthy adipocytes or fat cells to store all the excess calories being ingested (more details on that here).