The Doping Dilemma

Michael Shermer examines The Doping Dilemma, specifically in cycling, and describes the immense advantage from using recombinant erythropoietin (r-EPO) to stimulate the production of red blood cells:

One of the subtle benefits of r-EPO in a brutal three-week race like the Tour de France is not just boosting HCT levels but keeping them high. Jonathan Vaughters, a former teammate of Armstrong’s, crunched the numbers for me this way: “The big advantage of blood doping is the ability to keep a 44 percent HCT over three weeks.” A “clean” racer who started with a 44 percent HCT, Vaughters noted, would expect to end up at 40 percent after three weeks of racing because of natural blood dilution and the breakdown of red blood cells. “Just stabilizing [your HCT level] at 44 percent is a 10 percent advantage.”

Scientific studies on the effects of performance-enhancing drugs are few in number and are usually conducted on nonathletes or recreational ones, but they are consistent with Vaughters’s assessment. (For obvious reasons, elite athletes who dope are disinclined to disclose their data.) The consensus among the sports physiologists I interviewed is that r-EPO improves performance by at least 5 to 10 percent. When it is mixed in with a brew of other drugs, another 5 to 10 percent boost can be squeezed out of the human engine. In events decided by differences of less than 1 percent, this advantage is colossal.

Pro Boxer's Punch Carries Heavy Weight

Unsurprisingly a pro boxer's punch carries a heavy weight — just how heavy is pretty surprising though:

Researchers at the University of Manchester in England were curious about just how much force a top boxer can generate with a punch. So they enlisted local boxer Ricky Hatton, an undefeated 28 year old light welterweight and welterweight world champ. And they had him hit a 30 kilogram punching bag with sensors attached.

The results should make any spectators who figure they could last a while in the ring with a pro think again. Because Ricky Hatton, who’s nickname is The Hitman, generated a force of about 400 kilograms. An average person with no boxing training can generate only about one tenth that much force with a punch.

Slow motion video found that Hatton could typically generate punch speeds of 25 miles per hour, with one blow reaching 32 mph. The best punch speed that one of the researchers could achieve was about 15 miles per hour.

I guess there's the question of whether a researcher is in fact average in punching power, or much, much weaker. Anyway, a factor of 10 is a big factor.

By the way, welterweight is between light and medium — just 152 lbs — so Hatton is not a big guy.

And, of course, 400 kilograms is not a measure of force — but we know what they mean.

Hunger Can Make You Happy

Hunger can make you happy — or at least motivated:

When our bodies notice we need more calories, levels of a hormone called ghrelin increase. Ghrelin is known to spur hunger, but new research suggests this may be a side effect of its primary job as a stress-buster.

Researchers manipulated ghrelin levels in mice through a variety of methods, including prolonged calorie restriction, ghrelin injection and a genetic modification rendering the mice numb to ghrelin’s effect.

Mice who had limited ghrelin activity seemed depressed. If pushed into deep water they made no effort to swim. When introduced to a maze, they clung to the entryway. And when placed with other mice, they tended to keep to themselves. (These behaviors were reversed when the mice were given a low-dose antidepressant commonly prescribed to humans.)

In contrast, mice with high levels of ghrelin swam energetically in deep water, looking for escape. They eagerly explored new environments. And they were much more social.

Dark Knight Shift

In Dark Knight Shift, JR Minkel of Scientific American interviews E. Paul Zehr on why Batman could exist — but not for long:

How would Batman get enough rest?
The difficulty for Batman is he's going to be trying to sleep during the day. He's going to be really tired, actually, unless he can shift himself over to just being up at night. If he were just a nocturnal guy, he would actually be a lot healthier and have a lot better sleep than if he were doing what he does now, which is getting some light here and there. That's going to mess up his sleep patterns and duration of sleep.

Wouldn't fighting Gotham's thugs every night take its toll?
The biggest unreal part of the way Batman's portrayed is the nature of his injuries. Most of the time, in the comics and in the movies, even when he wins, he usually winds up taking a pretty good beating. There's a real failure to show the cumulative effect of that. The next day he's shown out there doing the same thing again. He'd likely be quite tired and injured.

Is there any indication in the comics of how long Batman's career lasts?
The comics are really vague on this, of course. In Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, he deliberately shows an aging Batman coming back after he's retired, and he highlights him being tired and weaker. Somewhere around age 50 to 55, he should probably retire. His performance is going down. He's always facing younger adversaries. That is well at the end of when he's going to be able to defend himself and be able to not have to deal that lethal force. This was actually shown in an animated series called Batman Beyond.

Oh right. It's the future; Batman is old and he trains a kid to replace him.
You're familiar with that one? What we learn is that Batman, when he was older but before he retired, actually picked up a gun against a thug because he had to. His skills had let him down so that he wasn't able to defend himself without harming another person. So that's when he decided to retire.

How would all those beat-downs have affected his longevity?
Keeping in mind that being Batman means never losing: If you look at consecutive events where professional fighters have to defend their titles—Muhammad Ali, George Foreman, Ultimate Fighters—the longest period you're going to find is about two to three years. That dovetails nicely with the average career for NFL running backs. It's about three years. (That's the statistic I got from the NFL Players Association Web site.) The point is, it's not very long. It's really hard to become Batman in the first place, and it's hard to maintain it when you get there.

I believe Dr. Zehr has overlooked a key aspect of being the Batman — he doesn't fight fair. Criminals are a cowardly and superstitious lot, and the Dark Knight plays on their fears, while choosing the time and place of his attack.

I can't say I agree with Zehr's training advice either:

What's a realistic training regimen?
I didn't give a training manual in my book, but he'd want to do specialized weight training to build up an ability to work at a really high rate for maybe 30 seconds to a minute (the maximum time period associated with his fights). One of the early comics shows him holding an enormous weight over his head. That's not the right kind of adaptation toward punching and kicking. He's got to make sure he's doing all the skill training at the same time so that he's actually using the (physical) adaptations he's slowly gaining. In conventional martial arts, when people take weapons training, you're doing a kind of power-strength training.

What effects would all that training have on Bruce Wayne's body?
I looked up what DC Comics and some other books said (about Batman's physique). I settled on the estimate that Bruce Wayne started off at about six-foot-two and 185 pounds. I gave him a body fat of 20 percent (slightly below average) and a body mass index of 26. Let's say after 10 or 15 years, after he's become the Batman, he's weighing about 210 pounds and has a body fat of 10 percent. He's probably gained 40 pounds of muscle. His bones will actually be more dense, kind of the opposite of osteoporosis.

Are we talking freakishly dense bones?
The percentage change is actually quite small—maybe 10 percent. In judo, where people do a lot of grappling and throwing, you're going to have more density in the long bones of the trunk. In karate and other martial arts where they're doing a lot of kicking, there's going to be a lot higher density in the legs. Muay Thai (kickboxing) is a great example. They're always doing these low shin kicks. They try to condition the body by kicking progressively harder objects and for longer.

Lifting an enormous weight overhead — i.e. doing a clean & jerk — is excellent training for building up the muscles, bones, tendons, and ligaments of the legs and core, which are used extensively in judo — and in jumping from rooftop to rooftop. But Zehr is a Chito-Ryu karate-do practitioner who, I suppose, rarely jumps from rooftop to rooftop.

What Batman needs is a cross-fit routine with an emphasis on judo/jiu-jitsu, kickboxing, and parkour.

Also, I'd hardly say that Bruce Wayne was 185 lbs. at 20 percent body-fat before training. First, he started training as a teen — his parents were killed while he was a child — and, second, even a mildly active young man can be, say, 8 percent body-fat without really trying.

Nobody Lives Past Thirty

Al Fin shares an amusing cartoon. I hope I don't ruin the joke by pointing out that the average age of paleolithic humans might have been quite low, but some early humans lived to be quite old.

FDA issues warning on Cipro, similar antibiotics

Years ago, when I was taking a fairly long course of hardcore antibiotics for a sinus infection, I noticed that my Achilles tendons would pop where they attached to the bone. I wasn't sure what to make of it until I stumbled across a study noting that tendon injuries were higher in athletes who had recently taken antibiotics. When I mentioned this to my doctor, he looked at me like I was delusional.

Now the Food and Drug Administration has ordered makers of fluoroquinolone drugs — like Cipro, Levaquin, and Floxin — to add a "black box" warning that they can cause tendon ruptures.

The World's Healthiest 75-Year-Old Man

Susan Casey calls Don Wildman The World's Healthiest 75-Year-Old Man — although fittest is probably more accurate:

Wildman himself is a world-class athlete in several sports. In recent years, he has competed in the Ironman Triathlon nine times, the three-thousand-mile Race Across America bike race, the Aspen downhill ski race, and the New York and L.A. marathons. In the sailing world, Wildman made history by winning all three of the Chicago Yacht Club's famed Mackinac races in one season. He snowboards the Alaskan backcountry with Olympic downhill champion Tommy Moe. Two years ago, he paddled through the entire chain of Hawaiian islands on a surfboard.

Wildman leads a brutal group workout he calls The Circuit:

"People come here and say, 'This is madness! What the hell are you doing this for?' " he says, working his way through a set of shoulder presses. And it does seem fair to ask whether, maybe, two thousand repetitions might be enough to do the trick (especially since most people his age consider lawn bowling a fine workout). That kind of thinking is alien to Wildman, just as it is to the hardcore group of regulars who adhere to the same philosophy: When it comes to endorphin production, more is more. Along with Hamilton, Commerford, and Winn, the group includes John McEnroe, Detroit Red Wings defenseman Chris Chelios, and another dozen ultrafit men. In Wildman's crew there are stuntmen and ski racers and motocross riders. There's a sheriff, a restaurateur, and an ultimate fighter. There is the occasional celebrity (Sean Penn, John Cusack, John C. McGinley) or rock star (Kid Rock, Eddie Vedder). And one time, there was NBA star Reggie Miller.

"Ohhh, Reggie got torn up by this workout," Commerford says. "I saw him the next day, and man."

"Well, that's because Laird tried to kill him," Wildman says, shaking his head. "We definitely did all six rounds that day."

Thing is, for Wildman and his crew, this kind of behavior isn't abusive at all -- it's fun, heavily laced with lactic acid. "It's just that our play is harder than 99 percent of other people's work," he explains.

Fruit is Un-American

Fruit is Un-American, as Colbert explains:



"Me have crazy times in 70s and 80s!"

(He also closes the show with the same special guest.)

Virginia man sheds 80 pounds eating at McDonald's

Virginia man sheds 80 pounds eating at McDonald's:

A Virginia man lost about 80 pounds in six months by eating nearly every meal at McDonald's.

Not Big Macs, french fries and chocolate shakes. Mostly salads, wraps and apple dippers without the caramel sauce.

Chris Coleson tipped the scales at 278 pounds in December. The 5-foot-8 Coleson now weighs 199 pounds and his waist size has dropped from 50 to 36.

No mention of Super Size Me?

A Sports Parable

For someone so interested in policy and athletic performance, I'm remarkably uninterested in elections and pro sports — but this sports parable amused me:

But back to the series in question. Yes, Boston has won four games and Detroit only two. But it's hard to imagine a more arbitrary and undemocratic way to determine this series’s outcome than "games won." It is, after all, a bedrock value of the game of basketball that all points must be counted. But how can that be the case when every point beyond the winning point is ignored? There are literally dozens of layups, jumpers, free throws, and (yes, even) dunks that our opponents want to say don't count for anything at all. We call on the NBA to do the right thing and fully count all of the baskets that were made throughout the course of this series.

Once you abandon the artificial four-games-to-two framework that the media has tried to impose on the series, a very different picture emerges, with the Celtics leading by a mere 549 points to 539. Yes that’s right, the margin between the two teams is less than one percent—a tie, for all intents and purposes. This is probably the closest Conference Finals in NBA history, though I will thank you not to check on that.

How do we determine a winner in a series so historically close? First off, let's look at these so-called "free" throws, which are anything but. Who decides when these are to be awarded? Hard-working working-people like you and me? No, it's the officials, the league bosses, the elites.

(Hat tip to Tom.)

Humans As Climbers

If we look at humans as climbers, we're not half-bad:

A fascinating brief study published in Science (May 16 2008) shows the cost of climbing a meter per unit of body mass is essentially the same over non-human primates and humans (Hs in the figure). The data are all matched for climbing speed. Walking efficiency is also indicated in yellow.

We homo sapiens are pretty efficient climbers, though being the largest of the primates we may be a bit slower at it. On the other hand we are more efficient in walking. The reason for that is we have longer legs per unit of body mass.

The Uneven Playing Field

I must admit that I'm shocked that the New York Times is willing to address The Uneven Playing Field of scholastic sports — that is, the fact that girls and boys are different:

Title IX, the federal law enacted in 1972 mandating equal opportunity in sports, has helped to shape a couple of generations of girls who believe they are as capable and as tough as any boy.

For instance:

By Janelle’s and her mother’s count, her club team, with 18 players, had suffered eight A.C.L. tears — eight — during her high-school years: Janelle’s two, another player’s two and four other girls with one each. A high-school teammate one class above Janelle endured chronic ankle problems and, according to a Miami Herald article, six ankle operations — three in each leg — over the course of her four years on the varsity soccer team.

This casualty rate was not due to some random spike in South Florida. It is part of a national trend in the wake of Title IX and the explosion of sports participation among girls and young women. From travel teams up through some of the signature programs in women’s college sports, women are suffering injuries that take them off the field for weeks or seasons at a time, or sometimes forever.

Girls and boys diverge in their physical abilities as they enter puberty and move through adolescence. Higher levels of testosterone allow boys to add muscle and, even without much effort on their part, get stronger. In turn, they become less flexible. Girls, as their estrogen levels increase, tend to add fat rather than muscle. They must train rigorously to get significantly stronger. The influence of estrogen makes girls’ ligaments lax, and they outperform boys in tests of overall body flexibility — a performance advantage in many sports, but also an injury risk when not accompanied by sufficient muscle to keep joints in stable, safe positions. Girls tend to run differently than boys — in a less-flexed, more-upright posture — which may put them at greater risk when changing directions and landing from jumps. Because of their wider hips, they are more likely to be knock-kneed — yet another suspected risk factor.

This divergence between the sexes occurs just at the moment when we increasingly ask more of young athletes, especially if they show talent: play longer, play harder, play faster, play for higher stakes. And we ask this of boys and girls equally — unmindful of physical differences. The pressure to concentrate on a “best” sport before even entering middle school — and to play it year-round — is bad for all kids. They wear down the same muscle groups day after day. They have no time to rejuvenate, let alone get stronger. By playing constantly, they multiply their risks and simply give themselves too many opportunities to get hurt.

More:

Girls are more likely to suffer chronic knee pain as well as shinsplints and stress fractures. Some research indicates that they are more prone to ankle sprains, as well as hip and back pain. And for all the justifiable attention paid to concussions among football players, females appear to be more prone to them in sports that the sexes play in common. A study last year by researchers at Ohio State University and Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, reported that high-school girls who play basketball suffer concussions at three times the rate of boys, and that the rate for high-school girls who play soccer is about 1.5 times the rate for boys. According to the N.C.A.A. statistics, women who play soccer suffer concussions at nearly identical rates as male football players. (The research indicates that it takes less force to cause a concussion in girls and young women, perhaps because they have smaller heads and weaker necks.)
[...]
If girls and young women ruptured their A.C.L.’s at just twice the rate of boys and young men, it would be notable. Three times the rate would be astounding. But some researchers believe that in sports that both sexes play, and with similar rules — soccer, basketball, volleyball — female athletes rupture their A.C.L.’s at rates as high as five times that of males.
[...]
Men also tear their A.C.L.’s, most frequently in football and from direct blows to the leg. But even football players, according to N.C.A.A. statistics, do not rupture their A.C.L.’s during their fall seasons at the rates of women in soccer, basketball and gymnastics. The N.C.A.A.’s Injury Surveillance System tracks injuries suffered by athletes at its member schools, calculating the frequency of certain injuries by the number of occurrences per 1,000 “athletic exposures” — practices and games. The rate for women’s soccer is 0.25 per 1,000, or 1 in 4,000, compared with 0.10 for male soccer players. The rate for women’s basketball is 0.24, more than three times the rate of 0.07 for the men. The A.C.L. injury rate for girls may be higher — perhaps much higher — than it is for college-age women because of a spike that seems to occur as girls hit puberty.

Boys seem to learn athletic movement patterns simply by being boys. Girls seem to need explicit training to avoid "running like a girl":

“Women tend to be more erect and upright when they land, and they land harder,” he said. “They bend less through the knees and hips and the rest of their bodies, and they don’t absorb the impact of the landing in the same way that males do. I don’t want to sound horrible about it, but we can make a woman athlete run and jump more like a man.”
[...]
Silvers, along with a Santa Monica orthopedic surgeon, Bert Mandelbaum, designed an A.C.L.-injury-prevention program that has been instituted and studied in the vast Coast Soccer League, a youth program in Southern California. Teams in a control group did their usual warm-ups before practices and games, usually light running and some stretching, if that. The others were enrolled in the foundation’s “PEP program,” a customized warm-up of stretching, strengthening and balancing exercises. An entire team can complete its 19 exercises — including side-to-side shuttle runs, backward runs and walking lunges — in 20 minutes. One goal is to strengthen abdominal muscles, which help set the whole body in protective athletic positions, and to improve balance through a series of plyometric exercises — forward, backward and lateral hops over a cone. Girls are instructed to “land softly,” or “like a spring.”
[...]
The subjects were all between 14 and 18. In the 2000 soccer season, researchers calculated 37,476 athletic exposures [practices or games] for the PEP-trained players and 68,580 for the control group. Two girls in the trained group suffered A.C.L. ruptures that season, a rate of 0.05 per 1,000 exposures. Thirty-two girls in the control group suffered the injury — a rate of 0.47. (That was almost twice the rate for women playing N.C.A.A. soccer.) The foundation compiled numbers in the same league the following season and came up with similar results — a 74 percent reduction in A.C.L. tears among girls doing the PEP exercises.

The PEP program:

1. Warm-up
A. Jog line to line (cone to cone):
B. Shuttle Run (side to side)
C. Backward Running

2. Stretching
A. Calf stretch (30 seconds x 2 reps)
B. Quadricep stretch (30 seconds x 2 reps)
C. Figure Four Hamstring stretch (30 sec x 2 reps)
D. Inner Thigh Stretch (20 sec x 3 reps)
E. Hip Flexor Stretch (30 sec x 2 reps)

3. Strengthening
A. Walking Lunges (3 sets x 10 reps)
B. Russian Hamstring (3 sets x 10 reps)
C. Single Toe Raises (30 reps x 2 reps)

4. Plyometrics
A. Lateral Hops over Cone (20 reps)
B. Forward/Backward Hops over cone (20 reps)
C. Single Leg hops over cone (20 reps)
D. Vertical Jumps with headers (20 reps)
E. Scissors Jump (20 reps)

5. Agilities
A. Shuttle run with forward/backward running
B. Diagonal runs (3 passes)
C. Bounding run (44 yds)

6. Alternative Exercises-Warm Down and Cool Down
A. Bridging with Alternating Hip Flexion (30 reps)
B. Abdominal Crunches (30 reps x 2 reps)
C. Single and Double Knee to Chest (30 sec x 2 reps)
D. Figure Four Piriformis stretch (30 sec x 2 reps)
E. Seated Butterfly stretch

If the goal is to get teenage girls to perform more like teenage boys, they probably don't need stretching (step 2) or a cool-down (step 6). They need strength and power training (steps 3, 4, and 5). And they can warm up (step 1) with skill training.

Sled Dogs' Secret to Peak Soldier Performance

In Sled Dogs' Secret to Peak Soldier Performance, Noah Shachtman looks at Oklahoma State veterinarian Michael Davis's "absurd idea" — shared by the folks at Darpa, who have been funding all kinds of research into maximizing human performance — to study how the Iditarod sled dogs of Alaska manage to run for more than a thousand miles straight. in order to get our own troops running around war zones at peak efficiency for "days on end without stopping." The New York Times explains:

When humans engage in highly strenuous exercise day after day, they start to metabolize the body’s reserves, depleting glycogen and fat stores. When cells run out of energy, a result is fatigue, and exercise grinds to a halt until those sources are replenished.

Dogs are different, in particular the sled dogs that run the annual Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race in Alaska. This is a grueling 1,100-mile race, and studies show that the dogs somehow change their metabolism during the race.

Dr. Michael S. Davis, an associate professor of veterinary physiology at Oklahoma State University and an animal exercise researcher, said: “Before the race, the dogs’ metabolic makeup is similar to humans. Then suddenly they throw a switch — we don’t know what it is yet — that reverses all of that. In a 24-hour period, they go back to the same type of metabolic baseline you see in resting subjects. But it’s while they are running 100 miles a day.”
[...]
In fact, sled dogs in long-distance racing typically burn 240 calories a pound per day for one to two weeks nonstop. The average Tour de France cyclist burns 100 calories a pound of weight daily, researchers say.

How the dogs maintain such a high level of caloric burn for an extended period without tapping into their reserves of fat and glycogen (and thus grinding to a halt like the rest of us) is what makes them “magical,” Davis says.

The energy comes from somewhere, so they're burning carbs, protein, and/or fat; the question is how much of each? Human endurance athletes typically eat a high-carb diet — although that may be changing — and "carb load" before a race. They then "hit the wall" when they run out of glycogen, a carbohydrate stored in the muscles and liver. The body can store only so much glycogen.

We need carbs for anaerobic respiration, which we use for sprinting, but we can also use carbs aerobically for long, slow, endurance challenges. Fat makes a better aerobic fuel though, because (a) it's more calorie-dense, and (b) we can store a lot of it. At roughly 100 calories per mile, a 175-pound runner can theoretically go 35 miles on one pound of fat.

This Time, He'll Be Left Breathless

This Time, He'll Be Left Breathless looks at "endurance artist" David Blaine and modern free divers:

A century ago, Houdini was celebrated for being able to hold his breath for three and a half minutes. Today even a novice can quickly learn to last longer than that, as I discovered under the tutelage of Kirk Krack, the free-diving coach who has been training Mr. Blaine for his world-record attempt.
[...]
Researchers in the 1960s calculated, based on lung capacity and the effect of water pressure, that humans couldn’t dive deeper than 165 feet. Today free divers are going down more than 600 feet and returning in apparently fine shape. Most of the time.

The day before his attempt in the pool, Mr. Blaine was practicing in the ocean and told me he was headed down for a dive of 100 feet, so routine that he didn’t bother doing the usual preparatory ritual: a slow, steady “breathe-up,” followed by exhalations to purge carbon dioxide and then a final series of quick gulps of air called lung-packing.

I watched him disappear into the depths and then reappear about two minutes later, swimming smoothly upward next to a guide rope. But about 20 feet from the surface, he suddenly veered away from the rope and appeared to struggle upward with his arms flailing. His coach, Mr. Krack, recognized the symptoms of a blackout instantly and rushed to grab Mr. Blaine, supporting his head above the surface until he regained consciousness.

He’d succumbed, Dr. Potkin said, to one of the most common and sometimes fatal dangers of free diving — and one of the reasons you shouldn’t try any prolonged breath-holding unless someone like Mr. Krack is supervising.

“Divers rarely get into trouble at depth,” Dr. Potkin said. “But as the diver approaches the surface, the decreasing water pressure causes a drop in pressure of the oxygen in the brain. If the level in the brain gets too low, it’s like a switch: lights out.”

More:

The natural impulse to stop holding your breath (typically within 30 seconds or a minute) is not because of an oxygen shortage but because of the painful buildup of carbon dioxide. Mr. Blaine said he began trying to overcome that urge when he was a child in Brooklyn and at age 11 managed to hold his breath for three and a half minutes.

In his current training, he said, he does exercises every morning in which he breathes for no more than 12 minutes over the course of an hour, and he sleeps in a hypoxic tent in his Manhattan apartment that simulates the thin air at 15,000 feet above sea level.

He has been concentrating on lowering his oxygen consumption by slowing his metabolism, partly through diet (he fasted for 18 hours before the breath-hold in the pool) and partly through relaxation. In a test by Dr. Potkin, Mr. Blaine on command quickly lowered his heart rate by 25 percent.

“David seems to have a phenomenal ability, like Buddhist monks, to control his body,” Dr. Potkin said.

When Mr. Blaine began his breath-hold in the pool, his heart rate during the first minute fell to 46 from 81, a drop that was not entirely his own doing. Immersing the face in water produces a protective action in humans similar to that in dolphins, seals, otters and whales. Called the mammalian diving reflex, it quickly lowers the heart rate and then constricts blood vessels in the limbs so that blood is reserved for the heart and the brain.

By exploiting that reflex, free divers can remain active underwater for more than four minutes, and much longer if they remain still. The world-record holders have exceeded nine minutes after filling their lungs with ordinary air, and more than 16 minutes after inhaling pure oxygen.

You Walk Wrong

According to Adam Sternbergh, You Walk Wrong — because you're wearing shoes:

Last year, researchers at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, published a study titled “Shod Versus Unshod: The Emergence of Forefoot Pathology in Modern Humans?” in the podiatry journal The Foot. The study examined 180 modern humans from three different population groups (Sotho, Zulu, and European), comparing their feet to one another’s, as well as to the feet of 2,000-year-old skeletons. The researchers concluded that, prior to the invention of shoes, people had healthier feet. Among the modern subjects, the Zulu population, which often goes barefoot, had the healthiest feet while the Europeans — i.e., the habitual shoe-wearers — had the unhealthiest. One of the lead researchers, Dr. Bernhard Zipfel, when commenting on his findings, lamented that the American Podiatric Medical Association does not “actively encourage outdoor barefoot walking for healthy individuals. This flies in the face of the increasing scientific evidence, including our study, that most of the commercially available footwear is not good for the feet.”

Shoe designers are starting to design minimalist shoes with extremely thin, flexible soles:

At first glance, this seems like a sensible and obvious approach — to work with the foot, not against it. But it represents a fundamental break from the dominant philosophy of shoe design. For decades, the guiding principle of shoe design has been to compensate for the perceived deficiencies of the human foot. Since it hurts to strike your heel on the ground, nearly all shoes provide a structure to lift the heel. And because walking on hard surfaces can be painful, we wrap our feet in padding. Many people suffer from flat feet or fallen arches, so we wear shoes with built-in arch supports, to help hold our arches up.

There are, of course, a thousand other factors that have influenced shoe design through the ages; for example, people like shoes that look nice. High heels have never, ever been comfortable, but they do make the wearer feel sexy. In fact, the idea of strolling idly through urban environments has only been fashionable, or even feasible, in Western society for about 200 years. Before that, cities had few real sidewalks, the streets were swimming in sewage, and walking as a form of locomotion was associated with poverty and the working class. “Only the upper classes, and especially women, could wear shoes that clearly defined an inability to walk very far,” writes Peter McNeil and Giorgio Riello in the essay “Walking the Streets of London and Paris: Shoes in the Enlightenment.” Walking was for peasants, who were “barefoot and pregnant”; the rich, or “well-heeled,” took carriages.

Of course, more recently we’ve become interested in shoes that are promoted as being comfortable, whether they’re cushioned walking shoes or high-tech sneakers with pumps and torsion bars. Still, the basic philosophy — that shoes have to augment, or in some cases supersede, or in some cases flat-out ignore, the way your foot works naturally — has remained the same. We were not born with air bubbles in our soles, so Nike provided them for us.

Try this test: Take off your shoe, and put it on a tabletop. Chances are the toe tip on your shoes will bend slightly upward, so that it doesn’t touch the table’s surface. This is known as “toe spring,” and it’s a design feature built into nearly every shoe. Of course, your bare toes don’t curl upward; in fact, they’re built to grip the earth and help you balance. The purpose of toe spring, then, is to create a subtle rocker effect that allows your foot to roll into the next step. This is necessary because the shoe, by its nature, won’t allow your foot to work in the way it wants to. Normally your foot would roll very flexibly through each step, from the heel through the outside of your foot, then through the arch, before your toes give you a powerful propulsive push forward into the next step. But shoes aren’t designed to be very flexible. Sure, you can take a typical shoe in your hands and bend it in the middle, but that bend doesn’t fall where your foot wants to bend; in fact, if you bent your foot in that same place, your foot would snap in half. So to compensate for this lack of flexibility, shoes are built with toe springs to help rock you forward. You only need this help, of course, because you’re wearing shoes.

Here’s another example: If you wear high heels for a long time, your tendons shorten—and then it’s only comfortable for you to wear high heels. One saleswoman I spoke to at a running-shoe store described how, each summer, the store is flooded with young women complaining of a painful tingling in the soles of their feet — what she calls “flip-flop-itis,” which is the result of women’s suddenly switching from heeled winter boots to summer flip-flops. This is the shoe paradox: We’ve come to believe that shoes, not bare feet, are natural and comfortable, when in fact wearing shoes simply creates the need for wearing shoes.

Okay, but what about a good pair of athletic shoes? After all, they swaddle your foot in padding to protect you from the unforgiving concrete. But that padding? That’s no good for you either. Consider a paper titled “Athletic Footwear: Unsafe Due to Perceptual Illusions,” published in a 1991 issue of Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise. “Wearers of expensive running shoes that are promoted as having additional features that protect (e.g., more cushioning, ‘pronation correction’) are injured significantly more frequently than runners wearing inexpensive shoes (costing less than $40).” According to another study, people in expensive cushioned running shoes were twice as likely to suffer an injury — 31.9 injuries per 1,000 kilometers, as compared with 14.3 — than were people who went running in hard-soled shoes.

Cheaters Do Prosper

Reed Albergotti, of the Wall Street Journal, is stunned — stunned! — to find out that the benefits of steroids last long after athletes quit taking them. Cheaters Do Prosper:

In the study, which was completed in October 2006 by the Department of Integrative Medical Biology at Sweden's Umea University, researchers took muscle biopsies from 26 elite powerlifters who have competed at the sport's highest levels. Ten of the volunteers said they were not steroid users, but the other 16 had either admitted using these drugs in the past or said they were currently using them. Not only is it unusual for scientists to study elite athletes of any kind, it's almost impossible to study top athletes who are using steroids in competition.

When the researchers looked at the subjects' muscles through a microscope, they made a surprising discovery: Rather than returning to their original proportions, the muscles of the steroid users who'd stopped taking the drug looked remarkably similar to those of the subjects who were still using. They also had larger muscle fibers and more growth-inducing "myonuclei" in their muscle cells than the nonsteroid users.

This is not news at all to strength athletes:

The idea that steroids may have lasting benefits comes as no surprise to Larry Maile, president of USA Powerlifting. He says former steroid-using competitors who rehabilitate themselves often become top performers. "They're still bigger and stronger than they ever would have been," he says. There is no way to prove that they're still benefiting from their years of steroid use, he adds, but the question remains, "would they really have been that good had they never used?"

Charles Yesalis, a former strength coach and professor emeritus of health policy and administration at Pennsylvania State University, says athletes who continue to train can retain as much as 85% of their gains from using drugs. This isn't based on muscle biopsies or peer-reviewed research, he says, but on 30 years of experience with athletes. He says he has talked privately with hundreds of dopers, some of them champions, and has seen the permanent benefits of performance-enhancing drugs. "These things are like rocket fuel," he says.

Paleo Diet

I've long found the Paleo Diet plausible, but I can't quite agree with its premise:

The primary tenet of evolutionary medicine is that the profound changes in the environment (e.g., in diet and other lifestyle conditions), which began with the introduction of agriculture and animal husbandry approximately 10,000 years ago, occurred too recently on an evolutionary timescale for natural selection to adjust the human genome.

Evolution doesn't occur on a geological time scale because it's a glacially slow (and steady) process, but because there's rarely a need and opportunity to change in a big way.

If an omnivorous species finds that it can't hunt prey animals and gather varied plant foods anymore, but it can eat grains, that is a huge new selection pressure. A few hundred generations is plenty of time to evolve a response to that. After all, one generation will cull the herd quite a bit, and it only takes a few generations to artificially select a new breed of dog or cow.

The issue with humans, as I see it, is that the most successful humans, for thousands of years, were those who held onto the hunter-gatherer diet and some of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle by becoming aristocrats — don't poach the king's deer! — and lording over the poor peasants, who had to subsist on a monotonous diet while performing monotonous labor.

Evolutionarily, it's good to be the Khan, and that means that only some humans faced strong pressure to adapt to agriculture, while others retained the old ways and did not face that strong pressure to adapt to agriculture — they faced strong pressure to succeed at war. Then their downwardly mobile descendents ended up as farmers and tradesmen, where aristocratic traits weren't so adaptive.

Observations at the Gym

In his Observations at the Gym, Michael Gilleland notes that the gym crowd is "voluntarily adopting practices that used to be visited on prisoners as punishments," such as running on a treadmill — originally invented by William Cubitt as a punishment for prisoners (and a way to grind grain) — and wearing tattoos — which used to be the province of barbarians, slaves, and prisoners.

(Hat tip to Mangan.)

Growth hormones don't boost performance

Growth hormones don't boost performance — according to scientists, who won't study athletes using the drugs the way they really use them:

They analyzed 27 studies involving 440 participants. The results were released Monday by the Annals of Internal Medicine.

Researchers found that those who got the hormone put on about 5 pounds more of muscle, and lost about 2 pounds more of fat, although the fat loss wasn't statistically different. The researchers said some of the extra body mass could just be fluid buildup.

There was no difference found in strength or exercise stamina between the two groups, but there were only two strength studies and eight that measured exercise. Those who got the hormone had more side effects including swelling and fatigue.

The review couldn't consider long-term effects, since the longest study was three months, and most were much shorter.

The researchers also said the doses used in the research may be lower than those used by athletes, who may be combining growth hormone with other performance-enhancing drugs.

Scientists similarly found that anabolic steroids had no effect on muscle-building — because they refused to look at large doses combined with weight training. When they did finally look at the low end of what bodybuilders were using — 600 mg of testosterone enanthate weekly for 10 weeks — they saw tremendous gains from steroids. Hmm...

Martin Taylor Tackles Eduardo Da Silva

I prefer to stick to less dangerous sports, like MMA:

Arsenal's Eduardo Da Silva suffers a serious leg injury after being tackled by Birmingham City's Martin Taylor during their English Premier League soccer match at St Andrews in Birmingham, central England February 23, 2008.

Yeah, I think that warrants a red card.

Electronic Reminders More Than Double Exercise

Randall Parker cites a recent study showing that Electronic Reminders More Than Double Exercise:

The Dell Axim X5, chosen for its large-sized, easy-to-read screen and good contrast, was fitted with a program that asked participants approximately three minutes' worth of questions. Among the questions: Where are you now" Who are you with" What barriers did you face in doing your physical activity routine" The device automatically beeped once in the afternoon and once in the evening; if participants ignored it the first time, it beeped three additional times at 30-minute intervals. During the second (evening) session, the device also asked participants about their goals for the next day.

With this program, participants could set goals, track their physical activity progress twice a day and get feedback on how well they were meeting their goals. After eight weeks, the researchers found that while participants assigned to the PDA group devoted approximately five hours each week to exercise, those in the control group spent only about two hours on physical activities-in other words, the PDA users were more than twice as active.

One surprise was the participants' positive response to the program's persistence. The PDA users liked the three additional "reminder" beeps that went off if they failed to respond to the first one. In fact, almost half of them wound up responding to the PDA only after being beeped for the fourth time.

"The PDAs can really keep on you," King observed with wry humor. "We were surprised by that; we thought by the time they heard the fourth beep, they might find it annoying and not respond at all."

Wiihabilitation

More and more physical therapists are recommending Wiihabilitation:

Nintendo's Wii video game system, whose popularity already extends beyond the teen gaming set, is fast becoming a craze in rehab therapy for patients recovering from strokes, broken bones, surgery and even combat injuries.

Finding May Solve Riddle of Fatigue in Muscles

For years, exercise physiologists thought that muscle fatigue was a result of lactic acid. Feel the burn. Now they have A New Explanation of Muscle Fatigue:

Muscle contraction and relaxation are controlled by the release and storage of calcium ions within muscle fibers. Scientists at Columbia University say thtat muscle fatigue, largely misunderstood for decades, is caused by calcium leaking into muscle cells.

Muscle Contraction
Calcium ions are released into the cell, causing filaments in the muscle fiber to contract.

Muscle Relaxation
Calcium ions are pumped into storage, allowing the muscle filaments to relax.

The discovery came while looking at heart disease:

As the damaged heart tries to deal with the body’s demands for blood, the nervous system floods the heart with the fight or flight hormones, epinephrine and norepinephrine, that make the heart muscle cells contract harder.

The intensified contractions, Dr. Marks and his colleagues discovered, occurred because the hormones caused calcium to be released into the heart muscle cells’ channels.

But eventually the epinephrine and norepinephrine cannot stimulate the heart enough to meet the demands for blood. The brain responds by releasing more and more of those fight or flight hormones until it is releasing them all the time. At that point, the calcium channels in heart muscle are overstimulated and start to leak.

What can be done about that?

When they understood the mechanisms, the researchers developed a class of experimental drugs that block the leaks in calcium channels in the heart muscle. The drugs were originally created to block cells’ calcium channels, a way of lowering blood pressure.

Dr. Marks and his colleagues altered the drugs to make them less toxic and to rid them of their ability to block calcium channels. They were left with drugs that stopped calcium leaks. The investigators called the drugs rycals, because they attach to the ryanodine receptor/calcium release channel in heart muscle cells. The investigators tested rycals in mice and found that they could prevent heart failure and arrhythmias in the animals. Columbia obtained a patent for the drugs and licensed them to a start-up company, Armgo Pharma of New York. Dr. Marks is a consultant to the company.
[...]
“If you go to the hospital and ask heart failure patients what is bothering them, they don’t say their heart is weak,” Dr. Marks said. “They say they are weak.”

So he and his colleagues looked at making mice exercise to exhaustion, swimming and then running on a treadmill. The calcium channels in their skeletal muscles became leaky, the investigators found. And when they gave the mice their experimental drug, the animals could run 10 to 20 percent longer.

It looks like it works on human cyclists too — so I have to assume human cyclists will be using it outside the lab.

Body-builders pluck stranded car from ditch

Body-builders pluck stranded car from ditch:

A group of 10 body-builders from a German gym took a break from their normal training routine to help a driver whose car was stuck in a ditch, police said on Monday.

The men were training at the Explosives fitness studio in Bad Zwischenahn near the western city of Oldenburg when the 38-year-old driver lost control of his vehicle, veered into a meadow and plunged the front of his car into the two-meter (6 feet) deep ditch.

"They dropped their sweat towels and water bottles and ran over the road to the crash site," a police spokesman told Reuters. "They then heaved the car out. It only took them a few minutes."

The grateful driver joined the men at the fitness studio bar and treated them to a round of energy drinks, the police spokesman said.

Wary U.S. Olympians Will Bring Food to China

Wary U.S. Olympians Will Bring Food to China — but not because they're afraid of getting sick from local victuals:

When a caterer working for the United States Olympic Committee went to a supermarket in China last year, he encountered a piece of chicken — half of a breast — that measured 14 inches. “Enough to feed a family of eight,” said Frank Puleo, a caterer from Staten Island who has traveled to China to handle food-related issues.

“We had it tested and it was so full of steroids that we never could have given it to athletes. They all would have tested positive.”

What a splendid excuse.

Lord Minimus

I was just telling a friend about Jeffrey Hudson, Lord Minimus, whose story is far too strange for fiction.

You see, Jeffrey Hudson was born in 1619, and seven years later he was presented to the Duchess of Buckingham as a fine rarity of nature — because he was perfectly proportioned but just 18 inches tall:

Only a few months after joining the household, the Duke and Duchess entertained King Charles and Queen Henrietta in London. At the climax of the celebration, during an opulent banquet, a pie was placed before the Queen. Jeffrey arose from the crust of the pie dressed in tiny suit of armour to the shock of all in attendance. The Queen was known as a collector of rarities and simply had to add Jeffrey to her collection. Jeffrey was invited into the Queen’s royal household and, in 1626, he accepted by moving into Denmark House in London.

From there he receives an education, learns to ride and shoot, and begins to serve in diplomatic affairs. When war breaks out, he finds himself as a Captain of Horse in the Royalist army — where he ends up winning a pistol duel from horseback, which gets him expelled from court.

How much stranger can his life get? Much stranger. He ends up aboard a ship captured by Barbary pirates and disappears for 25 years of hard labor. When he returns, he has grown to 45 inches — which makes him merely a short man rather than a tiny marvel. He dies a pauper.

(Incidentally, most of us don't get those kind of results from additional exercise-induced growth hormone release. Of course, our growth plates have closed.)

That's Got To Be Disappointing To The Big Russian

Megan McArdle reminded me of The All-Drug Olympics, a bit of comedy gold from back in the day:

Dennis, getting ready to lift now is Sergei Akmudov of the Soviet Union.

His trainer has told me that he's taken anabolic steroids, Novacaine, Nyquil, Darvon, and some sort of fish paralyzer. Also, I believe he's had a few cocktails within the last hour or so. All of this is, of course, perfectly legal at the All-Drug Olympics — in fact it's encouraged.

Akmudov is getting set now. He's going for a clean and jerk of over fifteen hundred pounds, which would triple the existing world record. That's an awful lot of weight, Dennis, and here he goes.

Oh! He pulled his arms off! He's pulled his arms off! That's got to be disappointing to the big Russian!

You know, you hate to see something like this happen, Dennis! He probably doesn't have that much pain right now, but I think tomorrow he's really going to feel that, Dennis! Back to you!

The Road Back

Tim Layden of Sports Illustrated has written about Kevin Everett's devastating injury and The Road Back from paralysis:

On the first weekend of the 2007 NFL season, Everett fell limply to the Ralph Wilson Stadium turf after making a tackle on the second-half kickoff. He did not get up. The stadium fell silent, an ambulance drove onto the field, and players from both teams formed a prayer circle, the nightmare tableau that can unfold in any football game but is thankfully rare. Everett, a third-year player, had suffered a fracture dislocation in his neck and severe spinal cord damage. He would be the subject of grim prognoses (many victims of his injury, indeed, do not walk again) but also exhaustive and controversial medical care, including the groundbreaking use of a hypothermia treatment that has both encouraged and divided the medical community.

The details:

As Hixon started upfield, he angled toward the middle. Just past the 15-yard line he planted his right foot and prepared to cut outside, to his left. As he made the move, Everett arrived, shoulders squared, his body in an athletic crouch. Just before impact, Everett bent his upper body forward; Hixon dropped his upper body. The players collided violently, the crown of Everett's helmet meeting the side of Hixon's. "I've seen the play so many times, and it was the timing of it," says Everett. "I did the same thing I would do every time running down on kickoff team, got low to put my pads under his, and this one time he lowered his helmet."

Hixon was driven sideways by the blow, staggering to his right, where Aiken finished the tackle. Everett never saw that. "My body went numb instantly," he says. "I thought he kept going because it felt like he ran smack over me."

Everett's body went limp, and he crashed to the artificial turf, flat on his stomach, his head turned to the right. He was motionless except for a momentary twitch of his head and neck as he tried to lift his paralyzed body off the ground with the only muscles in his body still firing.

Fifty yards from Everett, on the Buffalo sideline, stood Andrew Cappuccino, 45, an orthopedic surgeon with specialty training in disorders of the spine and for 13 years a member of the Bills' staff under the team's medical director, John Marzo. Eleven days earlier, on Aug. 29, Marzo and head trainer Bud Carpenter had led a 1 1/2-hour spinal cord injury refresher drill at the Bills' field house in Orchard Park, N.Y. Cappuccino had nearly begged off — "I told Bud, 'That scenario is never going to happen,' " recalls Cappuccino, who'd yet to encounter a spinal cord injury at a Bills game in his time with the team — but Carpenter insisted. Now that drill would form the foundation for the seminal moment in Cappuccino's career. And in Everett's life.
[...]
Cappuccino knew there was a flicker of hope. On the field he had applied forceful pressure to Everett's lower extremities, from his ankles to his groin, and had detected a response that was absent with a sharp sensation such as a pinprick. This told Cappuccino that Everett had suffered an incomplete spinal cord injury, probably meaning that the cord was severely damaged but not severed.

Cappuccino then made two decisions, one that has reverberated through the medical world and one that has gone largely unnoticed but might have been just as critical.

First, he introduced mild hypothermia as a part of Everett's care. In November 2006, Cappuccino had attended a seminar of the Cervical Spine Research Society and sat in on a talk by Dalton Dietrich, scientific director of The Miami Project to Cure Paralysis. Dietrich devoted the last 10 minutes of his presentation to the potential benefits of induced hypothermia for neuroprotection -- the rapid cooling of the body to reduce metabolic demand and to prevent further damage from swelling and other inflammatory mechanisms. It is a controversial treatment that has not been established as a standard of care in spinal cord injuries and is the subject of considerable debate in the field. Partly motivated by that talk, Cappuccino had instructed the EMTs at Bills games to stock their ambulance with three bags of saline solution in a cooler. [...]
Second, Cappuccino instructed Lengel to drive to Millard Fillmore Gates Circle Hospital. Normally a player injured in a Bills game would be taken to Buffalo General, about a mile closer, but Cappuccino knew that Gates has magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technicians on duty 24 hours a day. This is rare, and with Gates's in-house CT scanning capability it would enable swift diagnosis of Everett's injury. The hospital also is the only one in Buffalo with a neurosurgical intensive care unit, under the direction of Dr. Kevin Gibbons, 47.

Everett arrived at the hospital about 35 minutes after the hit. X-rays and CT scans showed a fracture dislocation of Everett's cervical vertebrae at the C3/C4 level, meaning that one vertebra had slipped out of alignment and was compressing against its adjacent vertebra and the spinal cord in the neck. An MRI showed that Everett's spinal cord was 70% to 75% compromised, or pinched, by the dislocation.

Cappuccino and Gibbons, assisted by senior neurosurgical resident Ken Snyder, worked to reduce the dislocation. A halo device was screwed into Everett's skull, and while he remained awake, manual pressure and traction weights were used to realign the vertebrae and remove pressure from the pinched spinal cord. Next would come 4 1/2 hours of surgery to stabilize Everett's vertebrae and further decompress the spinal cord. Both the reduction and the stabilization surgery are common practices in spinal cord injuries and clearly were vital elements of Everett's care. [,,,]
Everett was placed on the CoolGard in the predawn hours of Monday, Sept. 10, and within two hours his body had cooled to a temperature of 91.5°. That morning Everett was able to squeeze his thighs against Cappuccino's hands. "Everybody was stunned," says Cappuccino, "including me."
[...]
Twelve days after an injury that could have left him in a wheelchair for life, Everett flew to Houston to begin rehab. Less than a month later he would be walking with assistance.

Soda, sweet drinks main source of calories in U.S.

Soda, sweet drinks main source of calories in U.S.:

Tufts researchers recently reported that while the leading source of calories in the average American diet used to be from white bread, that may have changed. Now, according to preliminary research conducted by scientists at the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University, Americans are drinking these calories instead.
[...]
Among respondents to the 1999-2000 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), more than two thirds reported drinking enough soda and/or sweet drinks to provide them with a greater proportion of daily calories than any other food. In addition, obesity rates were higher among these sweet drink consumers. Consumers of 100% orange juice and low fat milk, on the other hand, tended to be less overweight, on average.

Fitness trumps fatness in longevity study

Fitness trumps fatness in longevity study:

Men and women who were fit, as judged by a treadmill test, but were overweight or obese had a lower mortality risk than those of normal weight but low fitness levels, the study in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed.

Exercise expert Steven Blair of the University of South Carolina and colleagues tracked about 2,600 people age 60 and up, examining how physical fitness and body fat affected their death rates over 12 years.

Those in the lowest fifth in terms of fitness had a death rate four times higher than participants ranked in the top fifth for fitness.
[...]
The researchers assessed the fitness of the participants using a treadmill test, seeing how long they could walk while the treadmill's incline increased. They measured body mass index -- calculated from a person's weight and height -- as well as waist circumference and body fat percentage.

The study showed that even a modest effort to improve physical activity can provide health benefits, the researchers said. Those in the bottom fifth in terms of fitness were about twice as likely to die than those in the next fifth.

Protein found to turn up metabolism in mice

Protein found to turn up metabolism in mice — and increase their average lifespan:

Tricking muscle tissue to burn rather than store fat has succeeded in increasing the average life span of mice and staved off some age-related diseases, U.S. researchers said on Tuesday.

Mice bred to make too much of a protein known as uncoupling protein 1 released food energy as heat instead of storing it as fat.

"What we're uncoupling is the process of burning energy from storing energy," said Dr. Clay Semenkovich of Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri whose research appears in the journal Cell Metabolism.

"Normally when you metabolize food, you take the energy that comes from that food and you store it. In essence, you are coupling the energy in the food into a stored form," Semenkovich said in a telephone interview.

Mice that overproduced this uncoupling protein in their muscle tissue weighed less and had less fat tissue, even though they ate the same amount as normal mice in the study.

"They lived about three months longer on average, which translates into six or seven years in human life, which is pretty good," Semenkovich said.

The protein did not extend the maximum life span of the mice, but it did increase their average life span, perhaps because they were less prone to age-related diseases, Semenkovich said.

Mice in the study had a lower incidence of vascular disease, hypertension and lymphoma, a type of cancer.

Semenkovich said these same uncoupling proteins occur in humans, and genetic variations in the proteins have been linked with people weighing more or less.

"It may be possible to accelerate metabolism and find an alternative way of treating diseases," he said.

How Yale Professors Lose Weight

How Yale Professors Lose Weight:

A Yale economics professor and a Yale law school professor are hoping that the next diet trend to take off is their own, which involves getting dieters to sign binding contracts committing to pay significant sums of money if they fail to meet their weight-loss goals.

The economist, Dean Karlan, tested the method himself, promising to hand over $1,000 to a friend every week that he didn't drop one pound. Soon enough, he lost 10 pounds, getting down to 170 pounds without paying a cent.

Now, Mr. Karlan and Ian Ayres, the law professor who also teaches at Yale's school of management, are launching a company based on this strategy. StickK will officially open next month, just in time for New Years' resolutions aimed at losing pounds gained at holiday parties and family feasts. The company will have a Web site offering individuals hoping to reach a goal — anything from sticking to a diet to learning to ride a unicycle — legally binding contracts where they will pay a set dollar amount to charity if they fail in their endeavor.

The author of the book "The Undercover Economist," Tim Harford, is testing out StickK's methodology. He has paid a $1,000 so-called contract bond to the company, and has promised to donate 10% of this deposit to charity if he fails to complete 200 push-ups and 200 sit-ups every week.

"When I signed up to do this, I thought to myself, the contract bond isn't going to matter at all; what's relevant is that I've made the psychological commitment to do these press-ups and sit-ups," he said. "I was completely wrong. There's absolutely no way I would have done these press-ups and sit-ups for the past six weeks had it not been for the commitment bond."

In December, customers will be able to decide on an amount to put up as collateral if they fail in their goals, and will give StickK their credit card numbers, which will be charged if they miss their objectives. There will also be a verification system, such as a designated friend or gym that will chart customers' progress.

StickK hopes to make money through selling advertising and through commissions on dieting products that will be sold on their Web site, Stickk.com. They are still choosing the charities they will include, and are focusing on ones that are not political or religious. Customers will not be free to choose their own charities, as this could lessen their motivations to achieve their goals. The name of the business comes from the idea of helping customers stick to their goals by using a "stick" as well as a carrot, the business's founders said.

Mr. Ayres said he first used the system to lose some pounds, and he now has $500 a week at stake to maintain his weight. He calculates that he has put over $21,000 — or $500 a week for almost a year — at risk through this system. But it makes more sense than traditional weight loss systems, he said. "What's interesting is that Weight Watchers costs you $500 a year and gives modest results. I put $500 at risk every week, but it's cost me nothing because I've met my goals so far."

Overweight? Standing May Be Solution

Overweight? Standing May Be Solution:

Hamilton recruited a few laboratory rats and pigs, as well as about a dozen human volunteers, including himself, to learn more about the physiological effect of sitting. The lab animals laid the foundation for the research in two different experiments. The animals were injected with a small amount of fat that contained a radioactive tracer so the researchers could determine what happened to the fat.

"What's the fate of that fat?" Hamilton asked during a telephone interview. "Is it burned up by the muscle?"

The radioactive tracer revealed that when the animals were sitting down, the fat did not remain in the blood vessels that pass through the muscles, where it could be burned. Instead, it was captured by the adipose tissue, a type of connective tissue where globules of fat are stored. That tissue is found around organs such as the kidneys, so it's not really where you want to see the fat end up.

The researchers also took a close look at a fat-splitting enzyme, called lipase, that is critical to the body's ability to break down fat.

After the animals remained seated for several hours, "the enzyme was suppressed down to 10 percent of normal," Hamilton said. "It's just virtually shut off."

The results from the animal studies were very convincing, he said, and human experiments were just as compelling. The researchers injected a small needle into the muscles of the human volunteers and extracted a small sample for biopsy. Once again, the enzyme was suppressed while the humans remained seated. That resulted in retention of fat, and it also resulted in lower HDL, the "good cholesterol," and an overall reduction in the metabolic rate.

A Thirst for Change

A few years ago, Kara and Theo Goldin quit their jobs — she was a VP at AOL, and he was an IP lawyer at Netscape — to renovate their house and raise their young children. Then they realized they had A Thirst for Change:

In May, 2005, the Goldins launched Hint, a naturally flavored bottled water made without sweeteners or preservatives. Kara is the chief executive; Theo the chief operating officer. This year they expect revenues of $3 million to $4 million, and next year three times as much. The water is sold in several grocery chains, including Whole Foods Market, Stop & Shop, and Ralphs, as well as small stores. And, because Cherise McVicar, Walt Disney's senior vice-president for national promotions, happened to try (and like) a sample of Hint, the Goldins now have an arrangement to put Disney' characters on their bottles.

For the Goldins, the years between leaving their familiar world and entering unknown terrain were filled with questioning, sussing out possibilities, then a moment of recognition followed by months of experimenting, gathering info, listening, cold-calling, and being called naive. Then they just plunged in.
[...]
Kara began paying more attention to the concerns of health-conscious mothers. "I was looking for the low-hanging fruit," she says. Then there it was: the sugared-up juice box. "I always wondered why there wasn't another option." There is, of course. It's called water. But Kara figured kids (and everyone else) wanted a drink with flavor. At spas, she had been served water with fruit in it, and realized there was something to that: "I thought someone should put it in a bottle."

Kara began testing fruit combinations on her family and friends while trying to squeeze information from any people in the beverage business who would talk to her. They were pretty skeptical that someone without any experience could succeed with the most difficult of drinks to produce and sell: one that was unsweetened and made without preservatives.

When she put together a business plan in 2004, she started to see what the skeptics were getting at. "I had no resources for labels, bottles, bottlers," she says. "I had only halfway listened to their point about how hard it is to get shelf space [in stores]." The only thing that wasn't a problem was money: She and Theo financed the company themselves initially. Now, after additional investments from friends and family, they own more than 90%.

Theo began devoting more time to Hint about six months before the May, 2005, launch — in two stores, one in Marin County, Calif., and the other in Manhattan. They hadn't signed up any distributors yet, so they drove the first delivery to the local gourmet market (one case of each flavor — apple, cucumber, lime, and tangerine).

A few months later, they got their first big break. At the Fancy Food Show in New York, the San Francisco buyer for Whole Foods expressed interest in carrying Hint. He asked if the Goldins were with United Natural Foods (UNFI ). They had no idea what that was. Turns out it is the largest natural food distributor in the U.S. With the promise of Whole Foods as a customer, they worked out an agreement.

Getting distributors is what it's all about in the beverage business. And for those who work on other things besides health foods, an unsweetened drink retailing for $1.69-$3.00 is a hard sell. The Goldins did, though, just manage to get in with an important network of independent distributors. "They have surprised a lot of people," says Gerry Khermouch, the editor of Beverage Business Insights. "They're selling overpriced, unsweetened water with a slight hint of fruit. They're the niche of the niche."

Now the Goldins have begun to grapple with some of the compromises they made early on. They've improved the production process so that Hint has a shelf life of 12 months instead of four. They've changed their 16-ounce bottle, which was originally an inch shorter than others on the shelves and looked puny by comparison. Their new one is a st