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.

The Truth About Core Training: Why You Should NOT Be Doing Crunches

What does everyone who wants a better stomach do? Crunches, crunches and more crunches.

Why? Because that’s what he or she sees everyone else doing. The funny thing is that rarely if ever do those other people doing all those crunches actually have midsections worth emulating. Somehow our minds filter out all of the people crunching until the cows come home with no results, and only pay attention to the 3% of people in the lucky sperm club that look good.

I’m not really pointing any fingers here because I did the same thing for at least a decade myself.

Why You Should Not Be Doing Crunches (and most, if not all traditional ab work for that matter)

#1.  It will not make you look any better: Everyone that I have ever met who was dissatisfied with their midsection only ever has ONE problem – there’s too much fat over top of their ab muscles.

You were born with your abs in a 4, 6 or 8 pack and when you die, they’re going to be that way too.  The only issue is that the layer of fat on top of them is too thick for you to be able to see them.

The solution to a better stomach is a good fat-loss program.  (I’ve written about the hierarchy of fat-loss before.)  In 3 or 4 hours per week you can slash your body-fat in half (or more) with a good fat-loss program.

If you slash your body-fat in half, but do no direct ab work whatsoever your abs will look better than they have in years (or possibly ever). But if you waste those same 3 or 4 hours per week just working your abs directly, your stomach will look no better AND you posture will probably get worse and your back will probably hurt more.

#2.  Crunches make your posture worse:

When you crunch you bring your head, shoulders and chest down towards your pelvis.

What is bad posture?  A forward head, shoulders and a dropped chest.  Or, to put that another way, your head is forward, and your rib cage and shoulders are pulled down towards your pelvis.

If you already spend all day at your desk hunched over looking at your computer, why would you want to spend any more time hunching yourself over and over and over again with crunches?

#3.  They won’t help your back feel better:

Contrary to popular “wisdom” doing a bunch of “ab” work will NOT help to protect your back at all.

A little anatomy – when people talk about their “abs” they’re talking about the long flat muscle that sits on top of everything called you “rectus abdominus.”  It runs from the bottom of your rib cage to the bottom of your pelvis.  Its fibers are vertical.

If you think about the physics of that, you will realize that there is no possible way that a vertical muscle on the front of your body can provide any support to a vertical structure on the back of your body (your spine).

Think about it.  If it contracts concentrically (gets shorter), then it just lowers your rib cage which actually rounds your lower back and puts it in a position that it is MORE vulnerable to injury in.

If it contracts eccentrically (resists getting longer), it keeps the rib cage from moving backward.  How does that support your lower back when lifting or twisting?

Your Own Weight Belt

The reason why people where weight belts is that if you synch them up tightly enough the squeezing of your midsection provides support for your lower back when you are trying to move something heavy.  You actually have your own internal weight lifting belt of muscles that is built into your body.  It’s made up of muscles that tighten inwards to support your lower back during movement, lifting, etc.  These are the muscles that are weak when you have  “pooch.”

The natural question is “how do I isolate those muscles?”  That misses the point for a whole bunch of reasons that I don’t have the space to get into.

In people with a properly functioning core (and no back pain) your internal weight belt turns on automatically right before any kind of movement.  By the time you think about “bracing” your core it’s already too late.

What you want is the kind of training that puts your body into positions that force it to fire the right muscles at the right time automatically (without you having to think about it).

You will never throw out your back when you are all braced up and prepared for a movement.  It’s going to be when you don’t expect and your body failed to automatically and unconsciously prepare that you will hurt your back.  There is no kind of crunch that will help with this.

2 Core Exercises You Should be Doing Instead

P.S.  Don’t the FREE fat-loss bootcamp that I’m doing this Saturday (8-29).  This will be a very fun, fast and effective fat burning workout, and I will make a donation to the Capitol Food Bank on your behalf if you show up.  More details right here.  This will be the kind of training that will actually help your midsection look better.

Josef Brandenburg is Washington, DC’s top personal trainer for busy people. 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 copy of his brand new CD – “Why Eat Less and Exercise More is The Worst Advice Ever” here.