Matt Metzgar

Leaving Las Vegas

I don't like to write negative posts (and really, who likes to read them), but I felt compelled to for this subject.  I have been fortunate enough to find a job back East, where my wife and I are originally from.  Of course, this means leaving Las Vegas, and actually I'll be leaving here in a few days.

Las Vegas is the worst city I've ever lived in, by a longshot.  I don't like saying that, because there are probably some nice, normal people here.  But they are few and far between.  The majority of people here are not ones I want to be associated with.  After living here only a month, I realized this city was pretty awful, but it's taken a while to find the right job in order to leave.

The problems in Las Vegas stem from its economy.  The two largest employment groups are construction workers and hotel workers.  And you really don't need any education to fit into either of those groups.  So what you have is the majority of the people here are mostly uneducated.  It is also a very transient city, with thousands of people moving in and out each month.  All this makes for a bad mix.

I live in Henderson, which is supposedly a nice suburb of Las Vegas.  But if you drive through the neighborhoods, all you see is pickup truck after pickup truck in the driveways.  I have never seen one person in a shirt-and-tie getting out of a car in my neighborhood.  Instead, I see trucks, monster trucks, and maybe some new Ford Mustangs sprinkled in - bobos in paradise. 

And the best part is the price tags that come with these houses, mostly $300,000 or more.  It's really a complete joke.  People try to justify it saying that it's cheaper than California.  That's great if you've cashed out your equity in Cali and moved here, but what about everybody else?  The truth is that these houses are grossly overpriced, and that's why housing supply is at an all-time high here, right around 25,000 houses on the market (and only 1,500 selling each month). 

The other part to the housing is the density.  Right after moving here, I immediately felt claustrophobic of sorts.  Especially these new housing developments, they are packing these houses in together at an unbelievable density.  I remember touring one new house where you could literally stretch your arm out the window and touch the neighboring house.  This is just pure greed on the part of developers.  They act as if space is not a consideration when building houses, that people should feel just fine even though they're packed in like sardines. 

Another negative is the scenery, or lack thereof.  Las Vegas is just plain ugly - mostly dirt and cement.  I miss trees and green!  I've often wondered if this lack of green drives people batty around here. 

Here's one more indicator of things here.  Nationally, 1 out of every three people has low or "sub-prime" credit.  This is how banks classify customers who are credit risks.  In Las Vegas, 2 out of every three people have sub-prime credit.  Again, I think this is due to the lack of education of the residents.

Another way to say all this is that here, the idiots outnumber the normal people.  Therefore, I think the normal people end up feeling helpless and eventually leave.  I would not move back here under any circumstances, and I really don't care if I ever step foot in this town again.  I'm looking forward to the next chapter in my life, living in an area where there is a sense of community, where people actually care about things.

Goodbye Las Vegas, I won't miss you.

And Baby Makes Three

My wife and I are blessed to welcome our first child into the world, a healthy baby girl.  I've obviously been a bit busy this week, but I'm sure the blogging will get back on track soon. 

More on Easy Running

Previously, I posted about how top runners spend the majority of their training time performing easy running.  The authors of that study have recently published a follow-up study that looked at the ratio of different training intensities.

Their study compares two different training protocols:

• 80% low-intensity, 12% moderate, and 8% high-intensity running
• 67% low-intensity, 25% moderate, and 8% high-intensity running

It would be natural to think that the group that did more moderate training would perform better.  But surprisingly, the first group improved more in terms of running performance.

I do think that moderate training is overrated.  Mark Sisson, over at Mark's Daily Apple blog, had a good post earlier about cardio training.  His thought was that training should be a mix of lots of low-intensity cardio, with a bit of high-intensity work.  Moderate intensity work tends to produce more damage through free radicals as compared to low-intensity work, and yet the intensity isn't high enough to produce the special benefits of high-intensity training.

Easy Running

Easy or slow running seems to be an "easy" target for a lot of fitness writers.  From outside appearances, it would seem that easy running doesn't produce many benefits.  One perspective I've heard countless times is that slow running in training makes for a slow runner.  But there is much more to this issue.

I think of easy running as a means to an ultimate end: aerobic capacity.  My logic on the subject goes like this:

• Usually, the higher a person's aerobic capacity, the more health benefits a person receives
• Middle and long-distance runners have some of the highest measures of aerobic capacity, higher than that of sprinters
• All top middle and long-distance perform a large volume of easy running

Easy running by itself does not produce much gains in aerobic capacity.  But it does help build an aerobic base, to which more intense interval training (which does build aerobic capacity) can be added.

For example, here's an article about Alan Webb and his quest for a faster mile.  Though he can run a mile in under 4 minutes, which is a relatively short amount of time, he still performs a large volume of easy running in training.

Some people confuse the whole issue by stating that interval training is more effective than moderate or slow running in terms of increasing aerobic capacity (vo2max).  This is true, but it is short-sighted.  Again, middle and long-distance runners have higher aerobic capacity than sprinters.  Middle and long-distance runners perform both interval training and lots of easy running, while sprinters perform mostly interval training/sprints and maybe a bit of easy running.  Therefore, it seems apparent that easy running is an essential part of maximizing aerobic capacity.

Tied Up

I have been and will be tied up for the next few days, but I will have some new posts later this week or this weekend.

Moblogging

The post below is my first attempt at "moblogging" (mobile blogging).  I sent the picture directly from my cell phone to the blog.  I'm still trying to work the kinks out, but this seems like a pretty neat feature.  Also, I'm getting a new phone soon, so the picture quality will improve.

Moblogging Test

Operation 20/20

I was at Vitamin Shoppe earlier and they had a charitable promotion going on.  The promotion was for "Operation 20/20", a program which distributes Vitamin A to children in poor areas in order to prevent blindness.  If you donated five dollars, you donated enough to help 20 children and you also received a bracelet.  I went ahead with this as it seems like a great cause.

The parent organization for Operation 20/20, Vitamin Angels, operates five different programs to help people in need.

The Cholesterol Problem, Part II

As discussed in Part I, blood cholesterol levels can be affected by the intake of various fats.  The other factor impacting blood cholesterol levels is the cholesterol absorption in the body.  Blocking cholesterol absorption in the body is the basis of statins, and statins are effective at lowering cholesterol, their side effects notwithstanding.  But for those of us wanting to go the natural route in lowering cholesterol absoption, there is another method - plant sterols.

Plant sterols are a natural substance found in various plant foods.  Here is a great paper that reviews plant sterols and their effect on blood cholesterol levels.  It points out that "plant sterols were briefly used in the reduction of blood cholesterol levels before the introduction of pharmacological agents".  Therefore, in a sense plant sterols were a precursor to modern array of statins.  This review also shows that plant sterols are effective at blocking cholesterol absoption and lowering LDL cholesterol levels.

For a person wanting to increase their intake of plant sterols, they could simply eat more plant food.  But you have to eat a great deal of plant food just to get a few grams of plant sterols.  An easier method might be to use a modern product like Benecol, which is a butter substitute that contains plant sterols.  Of course, there are other benefits to eating plant foods besides just plant sterols, and a person will miss out on these benefits by eating little plant food and just the plant sterols. But the sterols by themselves are still effective at lowering cholesterol.

Another newer option is to consumer plant sterol in a supplement pill form.  A recent study shows that plant sterols in pill form are equally effective.

Tieing all this together, you can see that a hunter-gatherer diet would naturally lead to low blood cholesterol levels.  First, they ate a diet that even though it was high in fat, contained low saturated fat and no trans fat.  Second, they did consume a good deal of dietary cholesterol, but as I've shown this only has a small impact on blood cholesterol levels.  Third, they ate a large amount of plant food, which provided the plant sterols which helped to block cholesterol absoption.

Hunter-gatherers had total cholesterol levels around 120.  I think Loren Cordain has show pretty convincingly (papers #28 and #34) that lower LDL cholesterol, in the range of 30 to 70, is optimal.  The current cholesterol guidelines need to be revised downward, and with the appropriate dietary changes and supplements, blood cholesterol levels can be lowered to these healthy levels. 

The Cholesterol Problem, Part I

I've been thinking a good deal about high cholesterol after reading Alberto Salazar's story about his recent heart attack.  As I've posted before, staying active and staying lean are two keys for maintaining low blood cholesterol.  Yet Salazar was quite active and lean.  So I began to wonder if high blood cholesterol could be a separate problem from other conditions.

Usually, you see high blood cholesterol as a part of the "metabolic syndrome", a whole combination of health problems happening at the same time.  Given the Western combination of inactivity and a high-saturated-fat, high-glycemic-diet, you often see people with a number of linked conditions: diabetes, insulin resistance, obesity, high cholesterol, etc.  But in Salazar's case, he had high blood cholesterol without any of these other conditions (he did have high blood pressure, but this is most likely the result of the high blood cholesterol and the corresponding blocked arteries).

So how can a person who is lean and active with a relatively decent diet end up with heart disease and blocked arteries?  To me, this sets up like a supply-and-demand problem between cholesterol intake/production and cholesterol absorbtion in the body.

First, does a higher dietary intake of cholesterol lead to high blood cholesterol?  My vote is no.  In the past, studies failed to separate out the effects of cholesterol from saturated fat in the diet.  When this has been properly done, an increase in dietary cholesterol leads to a minimal increase in blood cholesterol levels.  For more about this, here's a good review on this subject.

Second, radically decreasing the intake of dietary cholesterol, such as through a low-fat, low-cholesterol diet, doesn't do much to decrease blood cholesterol either.  Typically with these studies, you see a sharp drop in cholesterol levels but then the body adapts in the long-term and starts to produce more cholesterol internally. 

Saturated fat intake is one area that I believe can make a difference for blood cholesterol levels.  This new study looks at the regular intake of cholesterol and fats in children compared to their blood cholesterol measures.  Children with the lowest intake of saturated fat had an average LDL cholesterol of 95, while children with the highest saturated fat intake had an average LDL of 140.  Of course, this is just one of many studies which looks at the relationship between saturated fat and blood cholesterol.

Trans fat raise blood cholesterol level and have no nutritional value.  Thank goodness they are being phased out of most foods, and hopefully in the future they won't even be part of the discussion on cholesterol levels.

Given all this, reducing trans fat and saturated fat seem to be the only worthwhile options on the cholesterol intake side of the equation.  The other half of this is cholesterol absorption in the body, which I will discuss in Part II.