Better For The Earth & Better For Your Body

Here is my delayed Earth Day blog post.

All food is not created equal.  What you eat ate is actually very important for how you look and feel, and the health of our planet.

For example, look at the difference between an egg from a chicken that got to run around outside with some sun and grass vs. one confined to living knee deep in chicken poop, then fed corn and antibiotics.

BTW, “organic” mostly just means that they fed the chicken organic corn, so the feces that it lives in are more expensive.  (Who doesn’t like fancy poop?)  The good stuff is generally only available at Farmer’s Markets.

Beef For The Environment

Vegetarian activist groups like to say things like  “a steer requires about 284 gallons of oil over its lifetime.”

However, the fact of the matter is that grass-fed beef is probably one of the single most environmentally friendly foods you can eat.

The 284 gallons of oil is from questionable math, and it only refers to factory farmed, feed-lot cows that are fed a steady diet of government subsidized corn.

Cows actually evolved to eat grass.  Grass does not require fossil fuels to produce.  Grass does not require deforestation.  (Something to think about – what used to be living on the acre of land that is now growing the soy beans for soy dogs?  Whatever it was – the trees, the deer, the other plants, etc – no longer is.)

Corn and soybeans do require lots of fossil fuels.  There is all of the fossil fuel derived fertilizers – like nitrogen – that are needed for corn and soy.  There are the fossil fuels required to transport the corn to a holding site, then to a central processing facility, then to the end consumer; and in the case of corn-fed cow the end consumer is the feed lot.

Also mono-crops like corn and soy destroy topsoil year after year, whereas a meat-only farm like Polyface in Virginia actually increases topsoil year after year with essentially zero fossil fuel required to run the meat farm.

It’s Not Actually More Expensive

Excerpt from an article I did for T-nation:

Cattle are superbly adapted to thrive on high-cellulose foods like grass. That’s why they’re called herbivores (“grass eaters”). When you feed cattle a diet based on corn, soybeans, and other grains, they get fat and sickly, just like people. The meat becomes loaded with pro-inflammatory omega-6s and saturated fat; the anti-inflammatory omega-3s are practically nonexistent.

In an actual free market economy, only an idiot would grow corn, because it costs about a dollar more to produce a bushel of corn than the corn is worth. And you can’t eat debt. However, in our country, the government pays farmers to raise corn that the market doesn’t want. These subsidies have created a vast surplus of corn, which is sold to feedlots and force-fed to obese couch-potato cows.

It takes about 16 pounds of corn and soy to make just one pound of grain-fed beef. Multiply that by the thousands of tons of grain fed beef produced annually in this country. Under normal supply and demand, corn-fed beef wouldn’t exist: it’s only possible (by which we mean “profitable”) because of about 5 billion dollars a year in government subsidies.

Simply stated, the government uses your tax dollars to pay off farmers and cattle growers who produce inferior food that in fact poisons you. Think about that on April 15.

End of T-nation excerpt.

It might actually be cheaper too. This is an excerpt from The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Mealsby the very meticulous and interesting journalist Michael Pollan:

“[Joel Salatin of Polyface farms talking about the price of his beef, eggs, chicken, etc. vs. the government subsidized stuff at the grocery store.] He reminded me that his meat would be considerably cheaper than it is if not for government regulations and the resulting high cost of processing – at least a dollar cheaper per pound.  ‘If we could just level the playing field – take away the regulations, the subsidies, and factor in the health care and environmental clean up costs of cheap food – we could compete on price with anyone.’”

Better Body & Better Planet – Putting This Into Action

You can’t eat theory, and reading something makes no difference in your life or anyone else’s.  So, here are two simple ways to put this into action.

#1.  Go to a farmer’s market. You don’t actually have to drive to a farm.  People who grow environmentally responsible and healthy food will actually bring it to your neighborhood and sell it to you far cheaper than something comparable at a place like Whole Foods.

Here are two great directories:

Eat Wild (All farms are pasture-based – good for you and planet)

The USDA’s Farmer’s Market Search (No guarantees on if it’s pasture based or not)

#2.  Watch Food Inc.

Food, Inc.is a pretty good documentary on where your food actually comes from.  Surprising and motivating.

Don’t Forget About The $200 I WANT To Give YOU

The hunt is still on for our next fitness coach, and if you are the person who refers our next coach to us I will happily give you $200 real US dollars.

Details on the job and how to apply are here.

Josef Brandenburg is 2010, Washington, DC  Personal Trainer of the Year Nominee for both Personal Fitness Professional Magazine and The Washington, DC Fitness Association, The DC Fitness Advisor and the Fitness Expert for the PCOS Challenge TV Show. He shows normal people with hectic lives and average genetics how to create the bodies they want in the time they actually have. To find out more about the 7-Day Free Trial click here. You can also pick up a FREE copy of his brand new CD – “Why Eat Less and Exercise More is The Worst Advice Ever” here.

Where Are All The (formerly) Fat Trainers?

We’ve been working very hard looking for our next fitness coach at The Body You Want. My wife has interviewed 20+ people so far, and we’ve found something very interesting – none of the people we’ve interviewed have ever had a weight problem in their entire life.

That is very interesting ‘cause in the US, according to the CDC, 1 in 3 adults is obese and 2 in 3 are overweight. (Those numbers are inflated to be sure because that’s based on the BMI which classifies Will Smith as overweight. Have you seen Will with his shirt off!?)

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A better number was provided by the USDA – 71% of US women and 62% of US men are trying to do something – eat better, move more, etc. – to lose weight.  This is better because it reflects the individual’s perspective of themselves – do I think I need to lose weight?

It seems very unlikely that chance alone would give us 0 in 20, while the population at large would have 6 or 7 in 10 people thinking that they have a weight problem.

Think about flipping a coin.  There’s a 1 in 2 chance that you’ll get heads.  What are the odds that you can flip it 20 times and get head 20 straight times?  It’s 1 in 500,000.

That’s the odds of winning a million bucks in the Wisconsin lottery.

I have yet to win the lottery.

What If There Is Something Weird About Fitness People?

If it’s almost impossible that something can happen by chance, then maybe there is something about the people that we are asking that is unique.

Here’s my theory: What if the people that are attracted to the fitness industry happen to be thin people – people who’s bodies just don’t do a very good job of accumulating extra body fat?

My personal experience with other people in the fitness industry says, “yes.”  The vast majority of the people I’ve worked with in health clubs over the years are men who got into working out because they were too skinny and have a hard time gaining weight; and the women where often quite thin to begin with and wanted to tone up, or where thin athletes that wanted to keep doing something physical as a career path.  The last 5-10lbs were the only pounds they could actually gain.

There were exceptions – ESPECIALLY with the aerobics instructors (often ENOURMOUS).  But, on average, the trainers had never had weight problems.  The guys would diet from 8-10% body fat down to 3-4% body fat for a photo shoot or a body building show, but, generally found it hard to get above 10%.

One guy, who was a really nice guy BTW, was actually told by his doctor that his body fat levels were too low.  He was not trying to lose weight.  He got down to 4% body fat by ACCIDENT (you have no idea how lean that is, or how hard that is for most people to achieve).  And he WORKED at getting that up to 8%!

That’s not normal.

There is a guy I know who sells millions of dollars of weight loss E-books.  I went to see him give a talk about marketing fitness information.  One of the things he said would be a great advantage in marketing your fitness information would be if you had ever been over weight yourself.  With regret, he said that he couldn’t use this because he had never had a weight problem, like it was something to be achieved, not something that happens to you.

Getting fat is usually something that happens by accident.

Maybe I am a rare bird in the fitness industry.  I was fat and couldn’t figure out how to not be fat, so I figured I should study my ass off to try and figure out what to do because absolutely nothing from conventional wisdom worked for more than a few months.

Maybe the reason that so many myths that have absolutely no scientific backing whatsoever – like aerobics for fat loss – stay around so long in the fitness industry is because the vast majority of these people have no personal experience with being overweight.

Maybe people in the fitness industry read their test books that say that for weight loss people need to do 45-60min of aerobic exercise at 65% of their Max HR on 5, 6 or 7 days of the week.  Then when their clients go and do it, and nothing happens they assume that their clients are lying to them.

I Could Be Wrong

Of course it could always be that the people we interview are lying because they think that ever having had a weight problem would look bad to a potential employer.  I find it hard to believe that 20 people in a row would all tell the same lie, plus that is weird logic.

Or, it could be something else.

Anyway, it’s something to think about.

Don’t Forget About The $200 I WANT To Give YOU

The hunt is still on for our next fitness coach, and if you are the person who refers our next coach to us I will happily give you $200 real US dollars.

Details on the job and how to apply are here.

Josef Brandenburg is 2010, Washington, DC  Personal Trainer of the Year Nominee for both Personal Fitness Professional Magazine and The Washington, DC Fitness Association, The DC Fitness Advisor and the Fitness Expert for the PCOS Challenge TV Show. He shows normal people with hectic lives and average genetics how to create the bodies they want in the time they actually have. To find out more about the 7-Day Free Trial click here. You can also pick up a FREE copy of his brand new CD – “Why Eat Less and Exercise More is The Worst Advice Ever” here.

So, Are Whole Grains Actually Good For You?

The USDA, the American Dietetics Association (ADA), the American Heart Association (AHA), and most other major health organizations all recommend eating whole grains because they’ll supposedly:

• “Help you manage your weight.”  (ADA)
• “[Help prevent] heart disease, diabetes, cancer and GI disorders.” (ADA)
• “Eating whole grains… helps reduce blood cholesterol levels and may lower risk of heart disease… [and] help with weight management.” (AHA)
• “[Help prevent] chronic diseases such as heart disease and some types of cancer, diabetes, and obesity.” (USDA)

Where is the proof?

I had always been under the impression that these claims were actually based on some kind of proof.  Like they (or some researchers somewhere) had taken people and added more whole grains to their diet, and tracked the results and compared this to people who did absolutely nothing.  And, that there were some really promising results.

They had not.  Apparently, nobody had done the above experiment until very recently.

Guess what the results were?

The British Journal of Nutrition released this in March 2010 (a LONG time after these organizations had started recommending whole grains):

“Recommendations for whole-grain (WG) intake are based on observational studies showing that higher WG consumption is associated with reduced CVD risk.  No large-scale, randomised, controlled dietary intervention studies have investigated the effects on CVD risk markers of substituting WG in place of refined grains in the diets of non-WG consumers.” (emphasis added)

CVD = cardiovascular disease

Notice that I italicized and underlined observational studies associated with.  This is VERY important.  The research that all of these recommendations had previously been made on was only observation NOT CAUSATION.

In free living people there are millions of things going on.  Just because people who eat whole grains have less CVD does not mean that the whole grains are THE reason, or even part of the reason for this.  It could be that the people who eat whole grains really care about their health and they do 100 other things to be healthy, but the whole grains actually had nothing to do with their lower CVD risk.

Observational research is done to identify things that might be interesting to study in the future in a CONTROLLED environment.  You try to control everything but the ONE thing that you want to study.   And, you have a group that does not do anything and you compare results.  (This is the “control group.”)

In this case – the only thing that you would change it to add whole grains to someone’s diet and see if that changed their CVD risk factors (or weight).

This way you eliminate all (or as close to all as possible) of the other factors and find out what actually happens when I just do this one thing.  Does it work?  Or was it just an innocent bystander (or lucky bystander in this case)?

This kind of research has NOT previously been done, but the claims have been made as if it had.

What Happened

The researchers measured:  “BMI, percentage body fat, waist circumference; fasting plasma lipid profile, glucose and insulin” [and some other stuff that is too technical to mention].

There were three groups:

#1.  Control – the “we didn’t do nothin’” group

#2.  Intervention 1 (60 g of Whole grains per day for 16 weeks)

#3.  Intervention 2 (60 g Whole grains per day for 8 weeks followed by 120 g Whole grains per day for 8 weeks)

The Actual Results

Nothing changed.  Period.

“Although reported WG intake was significantly increased among intervention groups, and demonstrated good participant compliance, there were no significant differences in any markers of CVD risk between groups.”

Good participant compliance = these people actually did what we told them to do!

So, if there is no evidence that this stuff is good for us, why are supposed to be basing our diet on it?

Free abstract here.

Don’t Forget About The $200 I WANT To Give YOU

The hunt is still on for our next fitness coach, and if you are the person who refers our next coach to us I will happily give you $200 real US dollars.

Details on the job and how to apply are here.

Josef Brandenburg is 2010, Washington, DC  Personal Trainer of the Year Nominee for both Personal Fitness Professional Magazine and The Washington, DC Fitness Association, The DC Fitness Advisor and the Fitness Expert for the PCOS Challenge TV Show. He shows normal people with hectic lives and average genetics how to create the bodies they want in the time they actually have. To find out more about the 7-Day Free Trial click here. You can also pick up a FREE copy of his brand new CD – “Why Eat Less and Exercise More is The Worst Advice Ever” here.