Matt Metzgar

The Saccharine Disease

Here's a link to a great online book about refined carbohydrates.  At first glance, it may look like some crazy, outdated manuscript, but it is well-researched and has many valuable insights.

Can I Have Some Fries With That?

As mentioned, I have been looking more at carbohydrate intake as a key for muscle building.  I just came across this interesting report that shows that many populations, including European-Americans, have more copies of a starch-digesting gene. 

The report also contain this quote: "there's a growing movement among paleoanthropologists that suggests the dietary shift to more starch among humanity's earliest ancestors proved critical to our evolution".

Of course, there's a big difference between an evolutionary-type starch (i.e. sweet potato) and a modern one (french fries).  But the fact that french fried potatoes have been and are so popular may be saying something.  Though fries are often drenched in fat (and sometimes sugar), maybe people desire them because the starch is in accordance with their evolutionary heritage.

Swinging for the Fences

This year so far has been very fun for me, mostly because I've been doing a lot of experimentation.  My thought process is that good ideas will quickly rise to the surface, and that there's no sense in hanging on to something that isn't working. 

Right now, if any idea seems logical, sound, or has worked for someone else, I'll try it.  What the worst that can happen?  I feel the law of averages is on my side here: you're bound to hit some home runs when you swing for the fences often.

Paleo Diets and Muscle II

There were some great comments about how paleo diets affect muscle gain.  I am surprised that the higher volume leg workouts produced more muscle gain - I have been thinking it still ultimately ties to food intake.

I do believe the big question is how much overfeeding or higher-insulin eating is necessary for muscle gain.  I wonder if you can go high-insulin in the post-workout period and then go back to low-insulin the other days, attempting to get the best of both worlds.  Conversely, maybe a person needs to overfeed for a sustained period to convince the body to build muscle. 

It may be that traditional bodybuilding with its continual high-insulin eating pattern is unhealthy in the long run (as J Bennett pointed out).  You have some people who have gotten big through traditional bodybuilding methods, and then they use an evolutionary eating pattern to lean out and retain their muscle mass.  But I have yet to find anyone who started with a Paleo diet and gained, say 20 pounds of muscle.  So it may become a question of how to gain muscle with the least amount of negative side effects, and then switching to a Paleo diet to maintain the gains.

Worms?

A reader sent me a few links on "helminthic therapy" or the treatment of various immune disorders with worms.  This might seem a little strange at first glance, but worms were definitely a part of the evolutionary environment and they could have health impacts.

This site has a review of recent published research on the topic.  New studies are underway, such as this one in the UK.  It is certainly a neat area of research - it will be interesting to see how the work develops.

The Stone Age Landscape

A neat little picture of the way things used to look.

Paleo Diets and Muscle

I have been coming across other examples of people following a Paleo diet who have a hard time gaining muscle.  It's good to know I'm not the only one, and it may show that a Paleo diet has to be altered somewhat in order to gain significant muscle.

I have added more protein and fat this last month, but it has not led to much weight gain.  So this leaves either adding even more protein and fat, or looking at carbohydrate intake.  I find it interesting that most of the bodybuilder diets I have come across are high-carb.  For example, Steve Reeves' diet was 60% carbohydrate.

This research paper recommends a diet of 55-60% carbohydrate for bodybuilders, both for off-season and pre-contest.  Analysis of hunter-gatherer diets show them to be only 22-40% carbohydrate, so there might be a problem here.

Maybe there is a minimum carbohydrate level that needs to be surpassed in order to build significant muscle.  This could be related to glycogen stores.  If the body is low on glycogen, then perhaps this becomes more of a priority than building muscle.   

The Freedom to Eat

One danger I see with a lot of eating plans is the overall relationship that a person develops with food.  It almost seems like some plans make food out to be evil - something that needs to be controlled and guarded against.

In the long-run, you would want a person to have a healthy attitude to eating, not a neurotic one.  I think this can happen on both sides of the eating equation, whether a person is trying to diet and lose weight or eat more and gain weight.  Too much command-and-control spells trouble in the long run.

For example, the other night I literally "forgot" to eat dinner.  I was busy and apparently not hungry, and I didn't realize until I woke up hungry the next morning that I hadn't eaten dinner.  But to me, all this was no big deal.

It works the other way too.  Some people count every calorie and try to keep their eating so tight that they are setting themselves up for trouble.  It's like they put themselves in a pressure cooker, and eventually it will blow.

Generally, I just try to eat Paleo foods and eat when hungry.  But if occassionally I want to eat a not-so-healthy food, then i just go ahead and eat that as well.  I think any negative effects from the food are ultimately outweighed by the fact that I don't make a big deal out of it.  If forbidden fruit isn't really forbidden, then you don't desire it as much.  And so a long-run strategy of eating freedom will probably yield better results than a controlling approach. 

Watch Me Explode

I bought a new book the other day, "The TNT Diet".  I bought it only because the book summary mentioned eating in cycles, and I thought it could help me refine my feast/fast model.

Unfortunately, I felt the book made little sense.  It had a number of plans you could choose based on how much fat you had to lose.  But what if instead of trying to lose fat, you're trying to build muscle (like me)?  Then I guess you just wasted 20 bucks.

The book recommends a low-carb diet most of the week, with brief periods of higher carbs for post-workout nutrition and also a general carb-load session.  There seems to be no rhyme or reason behind the timing of the general carb-load.

Does the program work?  Probably, but the lack of a theoretical structure to it bugs me.  It's probably better than a good amount of other fad diets, but I don't see anything revolutionary in the program.

Comfortably Numb

A reader sent me this interesting link on stressors and depression.  A researcher hypothesized that throughout evolution, people were subjected to thermic stressors, like a swim in cold water.  The author then hypothesizes that a lack of such stressors in modern life can lead to depression.

The study used cold showers once or twice a day to try and recreate these stressors.  Though this was a small study and the results were statistically insignificant, the author found this therapy worked very well in relieving symptoms of depression.