Eat Early To Avoid Early Stroke And Heart Disease
Studies on meal timing or “periodized nutrition” have produced varied results on a variety of important body metrics like glucose, insulin, and even endurance performance. Sometimes it’s instructive to look beyond these to hard-stop events like strokes and heart attacks.
That’s what Dr. Gabe Mirkin does here, summarizing several large, impressive studies that, in sum, seem to conclude: Eat breakfast fairly early in the day, and definitely eat dinner early in the evening--well before bedtime.
One big review (with free full text) recently followed 103,000 subjects for more than 7 years. “The researchers found that each hour of delaying dinner after 5 PM was associated with a 7 percent increased risk for a stroke, and that eating dinner after 9 PM was associated with a 28 percent increased risk for a heart attack, compared to eating before 8 PM.” They also found that eating breakfast after 8 am “was associated with increased risk for both heart attacks and strokes.”
Mirkin cites other papers that have reached similar conclusions, and explains why late dinners can be harmful to your health. To put it simply: You need to move after you eat, and you probably aren’t moving much after a 9 pm dinner.
Based on these papers, the following seems a good approach: Eat dinner early, then take a 12 hour break until you break your fast relatively early the next morning. More at DrMirkin.com.
7 Ways To Run More And Better In 2024
Some things are complicated, some aren’t. Brain surgery belongs in the first category. Running falls into the second. This is a 10 second “read” from a running physiotherapist. It might be slight, but it carries a big potential impact.
You can’t do any better than Scott Carlin’s first piece of advice: “Start with identity. You’re a runner.” This means: Even if you just run 8 miles a week, you take your running seriously, along with all the other health-fitness habits that you know should be part of your overall lifestyle ( good nutrition, occasional strength training, etc).
I also found another of his tips quite powerful: “Sign up for a race.” This underlines the fact that you’re a serious runner, and, as Jeff Galloway has often noted, it will “scare” you a bit. It will scare you in a good way, putting more motivation in your training program as you see that race date edge closer on your calendar. Since motivation is job one, races help you get the job done. More at X/ScottCarlin.
Secrets Of The “Super Masters” Runners
Richard Lovett coaches the highly-successful “Red Lizards” female masters running team from Portland OR. The Lizzies, both individuals and particularly the team, are frequent winners at national cross-country competitions.
Lovett also writes authoritative running articles and books and--here’s where things get interesting--contributes to astronomy publications. He combines both in this terrific article at Cosmos, not your normal source for running insights. It’s about “secrets of the supermasters” runners.
One of them: “Choose your parents well.” Okay, not much we can do about that.
But Bas Van Hooren, a Dutch elite runner and researcher into many key running-related questions, has lots more practical advice for midlife-and-beyond runners. It seems that keeping much of your training in the slow-easy range is helpful. Easy running is less likely to produce injuries, which Van Hooren believes a major obstacle for older runners. “You need to make sure you’re not getting injured too much, because you will lose muscle mass and decrease performance,” he told Lovett.
Also, don’t worry if you weren’t a star track or cross-country runner in high school. Many top age-group runners discovered their talent later in life. No one’s quite sure why this should be, but it seems a consistent finding. Better late than never. More at Cosmos.
Yes, You Can “Spot Reduce” Your Belly Fat
I feel like I was probably 12 years old when I first heard that “spot reducing” is not possible. In other words, it was a long time ago. Sure, you might be lucky enough to lose a few pounds/body fat on an exercise and diet plan, but you can’t control where those pounds will come from. Might be your belly, might be your thighs, might be your arms.
This was positioned as an ironclad human biological law. But a new published report based on a randomized controlled trial has cast doubt on the old truism.
The study was designed to test for spot reduction of the trunk (including the stomach). It used a sophisticated technique (dual-energy x-ray absorptiometry, DEXA) to look for any changes in trunk fat mass from pre-experiment to post-experiment.
Researchers gave exercise programs to two matched groups of subjects. Both routines burned the same number of total calories. One involved just treadmill running. The other combined treadmill running with maximal effort torso rotations and abdominal crunches.
Results: Total weight loss and body fat loss were the same for both groups. However, the group doing rotations and crunches lost “trunk fat mass” while the all-treadmill group did not.
Conclusion: “Abdominal endurance exercise utilized more local fat than treadmill running, indicating that spot reduction exists in adult males.” So, if you’re looking to shrink some belly fat like about 98% of the western world, keep running but also add some hard ab work to your program. More at Physiological Reports.
Yoga Breathing Boosts Running Efficiency
Yoga is a popular alternative activity among runners, particularly females. Many find that it helps reduce stress, and may also build strength and flexibility.
A new study asked a different question about yoga for runners: Can “yoga breathing techniques” improve running efficiency?
Experienced runners (both male and female) of “various fitness” were assigned to 3 weeks of instruction in 3 types of yoga breathing technique: “Dirgha (breath awareness)), Kapalbhati, and Bhastrika (high frequency yoga breathing).” A control group received no instruction of any kind.
Before and after the instruction period, both groups ran on a laboratory treadmill at a “prescribed relative perceived exertion (RPE).” Okay, this is not exactly the most vigorous test of running economy I’ve ever seen. It’s not the way serious running physiologists go about it.
Nonetheless, after the yoga breathing instruction, those runners ran at a significantly faster pace while maintaining the prior RPE. The control group did not change pace.
Conclusion: “Yogic breathing technique positively influences running velocity regulation during self-selected running.” More at International J of Exercise Science with free full text.
New Studies Reveal Slow-But-Sure Progress On Running Injuries
Exercise journals are full of articles on running injuries, because it’s such an important topic. After all, we need to get more people moving and running to overcome the obesity-inactivity crisis. But how are we going to keep them going if they’ll soon be waylaid by knee, Achilles, and other leg woes?
It’s not much fun to write about this stuff, because there are few positive reports to cover. I’ve read hundreds of reviews, and most conclude: “We don’t know enough about preventing injuries to give you an evidence-based strategy.””
You begin to feel a bit fatalistic about it all, thinking: “Okay, I’m a runner, I’m going to get injured. Just suck it up and deal as best you can.” In fact, this is what a lot of us do. We’re pretty hard core. We also realize that most running injuries are soft-tissue issues that tend to clear up in their own sweet time.
Here at RLRH we try to find positive (but realistic) outcomes, because we want to stay optimistic about our running. I’ve come across a few recently. Here’s a short summary.
When a top team did a new, updated meta analysis and systematic review of running injuries, they reached the usual conclusion: “Interventions do not appear to reduce the risk and rate of running-related injuries.” However, there was a glimmer of daylight in their analysis..
They termed it “an interesting finding.” For sure! There was “a significant positive effect on injury risk” if you followed suggested exercises “with an element of supervision.” In other words, with a physical therapist or someone making sure you did the recovery work, and did it correctly.
This suggests that injury prevention/recovery therapy is a lot like your training program. Consistency counts more than anything else. More at Sports Medicine with free full text.
The increasing use of digital, wearable technology is one of the big hopes in the injury-prevention world. A new paper found that a wristwatch with inertial measurement unit (to measure forces) and global positioning system (to measure speed) was used effectively by 86 runners over a 12-week period. The measured data was combined to create “acute load by effort,” which correlated with subsequent injury.
This means that future trials might lower injury risk by noting the acute load of your training before you pass the breaking point. More at BMJ Open Sport & Exercise Medicine.
Similarly, a RCT experiment with 160 Dutch runners examined the utility of digital inner soles capable of measuring impact forces. When runners received “real time” feedback regarding 3 run-related variables--speed, cadence, and footstrike--that had crept outside “target zones” for each subject, they were able to reduce injuries by 47%. Post-run feedback was not effective; it had to be “real time.” More at The American J of Sports Medicine with free full text.
A Brazilian team has been building evidence for those pesky “foot core” or “intrinsic foot muscle” exercises as injury prevention. I say pesky because I fail miserably at the damn things, but I’m going to have to go back and give it another go. In 2020, the group conducted an RCT in which runners who did a year of “novel foot core strengthening” reduced their expected injury rate by 58%.
Last month (free full text) the same team showed that this foot core program “reduces the occurrence of running related injuries by increasing the resistance to calcaneus pronation and building a more rigid and efficient lever during push-off.” I like the sound of a “more efficient lever.”
You have to go back to the team’s 2016 “protocol” paper to see illustrations of the foot-core exercises they used. More at BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders with free full text with photos (page down to Additional File 1.) For a short cut, check out this 7-minute YouTube video with several good foot core exercises similar to those used in Brazil.
When it comes to injury rehab, it’s looking like platelet rich plasma works well for tendonitis and plantar fasciitis. Also, if you’ve got bone-stress injuries, a recent review found that focused extracorporeal shock wave “may be a safe treatment for the management of bone stress injuries in runners.”
I know you’re not going to follow all these links. I hope that one or two might prove useful.
Listen Closely: Here’s What Evolution Teaches Us About Distance Running & Health
Daniel Lieberman is training for his 14th Boston Marathon, but that’s not the reason for listening to him, as you should whenever you get the chance. It’s his academic background and research, and his non dogmatic application of both.
A Harvard prof and evolutionary biologist, Lieberman understands the whys of exercise and eating behaviors, and important related issues (like footwear), better than most. Best of all, he doesn’t insist on monolithic health prescriptions from evolutionary data. Lieberman doesn’t espouse practices that insist on “one true path.” Rather he views evolution and human adaptation from a more flexible perspective.
In this expansive interview with CNN medical reporter and doctor, Sanjay Gupta, Lieberman ranges over his many areas of expertise. But first, how about his marathoning habit? “It’s kinda stupid,” he says with a chuckle. “Well, not really, but we never evolved to run 26.2 miles from one point to another as fast as possible.”
Sometimes with humor, and almost always with common sense, Lieberman explains that there are plenty of healthy diets and a wide range of healthy exercises. Eskimos thrive on mostly blubber, and vegans on plants. Running marathons and swimming the English Channel are a bit extreme, but produce hardy individuals. So do gardening, bird-watching, and dancing.
There are only a small number of key principles: Eat a variety of minimally processed food. Don’t gain unnecessary weight--especially not around the belly. Move a lot. Avoid large-scale “mismatches” with the human evolutionary past, the most dangerous of which might be a lack of sufficient daily exercise.
Lieberman explains it like this: Movement is stressful. It actually damages proteins, muscles, DNA, and more. However, the human body evolved to not just repair this damage, but to rebuild it stronger than before. “We end up being better off after the exercise than before,” he notes.
“But here’s the rub. We never evolved not to be physically active. So if you want to slow aging, exercise is the key, because it turns on many anti-aging mechanisms. When we don’t exercise, we age faster.” More at CNN.
Speaking Of Evolution, Should You Follow “The Paleo Diet?”
This actually comes direct from Lieberman’s research pursuits. He and his colleagues recently sought to answer the question: Should we all be following the Paleo Diet?
Dating back to a paper in the 1985 New England Journal of Medicine, the Paleo Diet argues that we should eat the same foods that our ancestors consumed 3 million year ago. The proponents claim that this is an evolutionary imperative. The Paleo Diet includes no grains or dairy products since they didn’t exist millions of years ago.
The current paper “analyzed data on animal food, plant food, and honey consumption by weight and kcal from 15 high-quality published ethnographic studies representing 11 recent tropical hunter-gatherer groups.” If the Paleo Diet was the only appropriate human diet, the researchers figured, then the 11 hunter-gatherer groups should all be eating more or less the same foods.
That didn’t prove to be the case. Rather “Our analyses reveal high levels of variation in animal versus plant foods consumed and in corresponding percentages of protein, fat, and carbohydrates.”
Conclusion: “The degree of variation among hunter-gatherer diets precludes any simple, accurate characterization of a “normal” ancestral diet.” In other words, there are plenty of different ways to arrive at a healthy diet, and much depends on where you live, ie, Alaska vs a tropical rain forest. More at The American J of Clinical Nutrition.
Of course, one thing does remain true for all the hunter-gatherer diets. The populations ate fresh, whole foods--not plastic wrapped, processed, ersatz foods.
SHORT STUFF You Don’t Want To Miss
>>> Water, water everywhere: How to determine if you’re drinking too much water
GREAT QUOTES Make Great Training Partners
“It doesn’t matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.”
--Confucius
That’s all for now. Thanks for reading. See you again next week. Amby