Isegoria

I’m not sure we needed this level of technology to confirm that people are getting bigger:

TC2, a company based in the Raleigh suburb of Cary, used light-pulsing, 3-D scanner technology to measure some 10,000 Americans of all ages and ethnicities. The SizeUSA survey confirmed that all those extra french fries have come with a price.

The study was funded by clothing manufacturers, the military and colleges and universities, all of whom have a keen interest in body sizes.
[...]
The last such survey of Americans’ bodies was in 1941, and it was a low-tech undertaking, involving measuring tapes.

TC2′s technology involves a 3-D measurement system in which four strategically placed cameras register more than 200,000 data points on the body. The data are then fed into measurement software that spits out 200 accurate body measurements in less than a minute.

I’d never heard any objective measurements associated with women’s clothing sizes before:

Size 8 has long been thought to represent the measurements of the average American woman. In the clothing industry, a size 8 officially is supposed to be a 35-inch bust, a 27-inch waist, and 37 1/2-inch hip.

But in the survey, white women ages 18 to 25 came in, on average, at 38-32-41, with white women ages 36 to 45 coming in at 41-34-43.

Performance enhancing drugs that are good for you makes some valid points but misses one key point: the most famous performance-enhancing drugs we already have, steroids, are already safe in therapeutic doses — they’re used for male hormone replacement and for mass-gain/retention in AIDS patients — and they’re particularly healthful for athletes trying to recover from tremendous training stresses:

One of the big sports scandals of 2003 was the discovery that athletes were using a designer steroid called THG [*] that was undetectable with the current tests. Subsequently we got to enjoy the usual gnashing of teeth about how drug use was destroying sports.

The standard argument for why performance enhancing drugs are bad looks something like this:

1. The drugs are bad for you.
2. People shouldn’t have to take health risks in order to compete.

There’s an obvious problem with this line of argument: training is bad for you. It’s true that getting some exercise is good for you, but the training loads used by elite athlets are well beyond that point. When you’re training 20+ hours a week, you’re at serious risk for overuse injuries. There’s also evidence that overtraining leads to immune system depression [*]. In fact, one of the major limiting factors in the performance of elite athletes is how much they’re able to train before their performance (and health) starts to decline due to overtraining, so athletes already have to take health risks in order to be competitive.

It’s not clear how true the first half of the argument is, either. Not all of the performance enhancing drugs are bad for you in therapeutic doses. Take a look at the International Cycling Union’s list of prohibited substances. All the major stimulants are banned, including Ritalin (methylphenidate), which ADD patients take every day. The World Anti-Doping Agency even bans pseudoephedrine, which is a common decongestant used in a large number of cold medicines. There’s a lot of debate about whether steroids are actually that bad for you, but there’s no serious debate about whether pseudoephedrine is.

Worse yet, it’s only a matter of time before some doping agent comes out that’s actually good for you. It’s easy to imagine such an agent, say something that would improve your recovery time from training, build more muscle with less training load (suggested by Kevin Dick) or keep your immune system high even under high training loads. Are those drugs going to be banned too? Based on the situation with pseudoephedrine, I’d say so. If and when that happens we’ll need a new rationale for why we’re doing it, though.

Supposedly, glutamine, an amino acid, can help dieters maintain muscle mass while losing fat. Glutamine No Help for Dieting Athletes reports on a study with wrestlers that does not support that hypothesis:

In the present study, Finn and his colleagues set out to test the effect of glutamine in 18 college wrestlers who were enrolled in a 12-day weight-loss program. All athletes consumed the same high-protein diet, but some wrestlers also took glutamine supplements. The other athletes received an inactive placebo instead.

All participants lost a significant amount of weight during the study, researchers report. Although the aim was to lose fat, not muscle, all athletes lost similar amounts of fat-free mass.

In fact, glutamine supplements did not have a significant effect on how much muscle was maintained.

Of course, wrestlers on a 12-day crash diet lose tremendous amounts of water weight — and water weight is “lean” mass. You’d think the scientists would have taken that into account…

I didn’t know that we needed a way to scan for muscle stiffness — I can usually tell where I’m sore — but Scan Painlessly Pinpoints Muscle Stiffness reports on the new use for MRI machines:

An experimental technique that uses widely available imaging technology is a painless way to measure muscle stiffness, researchers report.
[...]
The technique, known as magnetic resonance elastography (MRE), involves the same scanner used to perform magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), a technique that provides a good view of the internal structures of the body, particularly soft tissue, the brain, spinal cord and joints.
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Within an MRI scanner, the skin is vibrated, which causes waves to penetrate tissue and to multiply in muscle. Doctors take an image of these waves and then measure them to evaluate muscle stiffness.

I foresee the following exchange with an orthopedist in the future:

“You see these black dots?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s where you’re not stiff and sore.”
“Hmm…looks about right.”

Fat Cells May Be the Obesity-Hypertension Link reports on a recent PNAS paper:

Fat cells produce factors that directly stimulate the adrenal gland to release the hormone aldosterone, new findings show. Because aldosterone regulates blood pressure, these factors may at least partly explain the link between obesity and high blood pressure.
[...]
Other hormones produced by the cells also increased: cortisol was nearly tripled, and dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA) levels increased 1.5-fold.