Body mass index (BMI) is a very vague indicator of obesity and physical danger of illness in all people but with teenagers now one of the top groups in danger doctors have found a better way to assess risk of disease by adding an additional indicator.

Waste measurement should be about 1/2 of the height of an individual for a healthy weight/height ratio. . Above that ratio, they began seeing associations with cardiovascular risk factors.

Docs at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto completed a study that uses waste size as well as BMI for a more accurate picture of a teenager’s risk for cardio/heart disease. It’s probably a good idea to use that for everyone don’t you think?

Use the chart below to find your body mass index, but remember that it is very misleading. If you are a very muscular person, it might put your index into the red unnecessarily.

The end of the recent 10 year study came as kind of a surprise when researchers found a strong connection between diet soft drinks and cardiovascular disease. The research was published In the Journal of Gen. Internal Medicine.

Over 2000 people living in Manhattan New York or studied over the time period and found that consuming soft drinks on a daily basis is linked to an increased risk of stroke or heart attack and death. Of course the scientists advise that ” the message for diet soft drink drinkers is not to be alarmed,” Hannah Gardener, the lead in this study said that the findings may be due to any number of things but you won’t miss anything by not drinking soft drinks.

We’ve thought there was a parallel increase in the use of high fructose corn syrup and the incidence of obesity and type II diabetes not only in the United States but around the world. If you have diabetes II, think about getting rid of the diet drinks and cutting carbs to next to nothing and you could probably cure your diabetes.Personally I can’t think of the last time I drank a soft drink, diet or otherwise; it just seems that pouring junk down your throat is not the wise move.

No matter how you slice it – the one thing that all diets have that work – everything from Atkins to South Beach — is calorie reduction. All these “diets” are just tricks to get you to consume fewer calories with less suffering. The Atkins has a dramatic metabolic effect by lowering carb intake, but people that do the Atkins also reduce their calories. They find themselves ordering the steak dinner at a restaurant and discarding the baked potato. Well, that jumbo potato with toppings, has several hundred calories. If you eat your steak, green vegetable, and a soup, but skipped the potato you’ve reduced calories.

With all these juice diets and soup diets — weight watchers — and all the rest — add them up! People doing these things are eating less!

The mainstream diet gurus, that never get lasting results by the way, say “Don’t starve yourself. Take in 500 calories a day less than you burn, and you’ll lose weight.” Let me just say…WRONG! SERIOUSLY OVERWEIGHT PEOPLE NEED TO SHED THE FAT AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE. The health consequences of obesity can be life threatening!

The most effective method I’ve ever seen for lasting weight loss is a blended low carb method that starts with severe calorie restriction. Maybe 1000-1200 calories per day depending on the individual. Then add in exercise at a certain point in the diet, then the exercise gets more intense as the dieter loses weight and starts to be motivated toward it. The addition here of a whey protein drink to the daily diet but that’s it for a while with the additions.

Every 4 to 7 days must be a cheat day; that means eat regular amount of calories and foods to prevent metabolic down-regulation.  The way to do this is to start off with he cheat days closer together, then as you lose more weight, slowly lengthen the time between days as it becomes less of an aggravation, because at first it will be a little hard. I’ll put this down in more detail later into a downloadable guide, but this is enough for experienced dieters to get what I’m talking about.

People who get more exercise have higher levels of excitement and enthusiasm than people who are sedentary; this is based on a recent report by researchers at Penn State. The feelings are more prevalent on higher activity days.

David Conroy, a kinesiology professor at Penn State said, “You don’t have to be the fittest person who is exercising every day to receive the feel-good benefits of exercise,”. “It’s a matter of taking it one day at a time, of trying to get your activity in, and then there’s this feel-good reward afterwards.”

The prof also added that it’s frequently hard for us to commit fitness program for the simple reason that we usually will set long-term goals rather than short-term goals. And when there are slow results people will of course get discouraged and quit.

“When people set New Year’s resolutions, they set them up to include the entire upcoming year, but that can be really overwhelming,” said Conroy. “Taking it one day at a time and savoring that feel-good effect at the end of the day might be one step to break it down and get those daily rewards for activity. Doing this could help people be a little more encouraged to stay active and keep up the program they started.”

The study was done with 190 university students keeping journals, day by day, of their lives; writing about their fitness activities including sleep quality as well as psychological well being. The students recorded just the periods of fitness activity that happened for a minimum of 15 minutes.The research subjects turned in their journal each day for 8 days. The results are published in this month’s  issue of Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology.

The researchers found that the people who are more active walk around feeling better throughout the day than sedentary. And even better, an energetic workout can supercharge your feelings of well-being for much longer than the workout itself lasts.

It doesn’t take a scientist to know that a workout can make you feel great. Arnold Schwarzenegger remarked in the 1977 documentary “Pumping Iron” that working out felt better than sex. I wouldn’t go quite that far but I would bet that people have known about the effects of intense exercise for as long as there have been people.

Doing 3 quick sets of high rep squats can be a great way to wake yourself up in the AM. Beats coffee.

Check out this report on how to do squats for step by step instructions. Later.

An extremely exciting paper was published the other day in the journal Nature.

All the attention seems to be centered around a newly identified hormone that mimics a workout & could increase “good” brown fat in the body allowing people to burn unwanted fat much faster.

Brown fat in the human body was thought, for a long time, to be limited at birth. But it has been discovered that brown fat can actually be increased by intense exercise over time.Research scientists at at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, MA have identified and isolated a hormone in the body that mimics the effects of exercise on muscle tissue.

The hormone (named Irisin after the Greek messenger goddess Iris), is a protein and chemical messenger that may be used to develop completely new treatments for obesity and diabetes. It could also be used to help overweight people burn fat much faster by causing white gooey fat to covert itself into brown, heat producing fat.

The senior researchers on the paper are Bruce Spiegelman PhD, a cell biologist at Dana-Farber and Pontus Bostroöm, MD, PhD who is a post-doctoral fellow in the lab. Bostroöm says “It’s exciting to find a natural substance connected to exercise that has such clear therapeutic potential”.

More on this in the next few days as we find out if and when this will translate into anything actually useful.

T.

Here’s a question that’s always nagged at me. During a pushup, how much of your actual body weight resistance are you using?
The Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research has come up with some estimations. These are approximately accurate plus or minus a few pounds.

A network of research teams in Switzerland has found a tiny growth inhibitor that could determine how strong our muscles grow. By manipulation of NCoR1, a gene regulator, the team was able to control the action of selected genes. The suppression of this muscle growth inhibitor produced a line of super-mice that have muscles 2 times as strong as the muscles of ordinary meeses!

The initial research was done on mice and worms, turning them into our super-mice and some really strong worms.

This is seen as potentially a new way to treating muscle deterioration in various disease cases including sedentary or morbidly obese people who find it difficult or impossible to exercise. And of course athletes are very interested in anything that can double muscle strength.

“There are now ways to develop drugs for people who are unable to exercise due to obesity or other health complications, such as diabetes, immobility and frailty,” says Ronald M. Evans, a professor in Salk’s Gene Expression Lab, who led the Salk team. “We can now engineer specific gene networks in muscle to give the benefits of exercise to sedentary mice.”

The molecule involved has been described as a brake being put on growth. Releasing the brake by mutation or with chemicals can reactivate gene circuits to provide more energy to muscle and enhance its activity.

The researchers published the results in an article in the Cell, a scientific journal. They reported that the experiments were done on worms and mice at the same time and that the mice grew to become genuine marathoners. The mice were reportedly capable of running for longer periods and at a faster clip before they exhibited any signs of tiring. What’s amazing is that these mice were able to traverse nearly twice the distance of the control mice that had not received this treatment.

Earlier experiments had targeted the acceleration of certain genes instead of blocking their growth inhibitors, the endrun on these growth inhibitors seems to result in much more desirable results.

Johan Auwerx one of the lead scientists said, “This could be used to combat muscle weakness in the elderly, which leads to falls and contributes to hospitalizations,” And. “In addition, we think that this could be used as a basis for developing a treatment for genetic muscular dystrophy.”

There was no word of when they will try this on humans but we will be watching this one closely.

While studying RGS9-2, a brain protein that’s involved in the involuntary movements that are a symptom of Parkinson’s disease, researchers found that the protein also can regulate weight loss in mice.

The scientist, Abraham Kovoor of the University of Rhode Island’s College of Pharmacy said,”We have identified a new gene that likely regulates weight gain through metabolism.”

It seems that the mice with less of the protein gained weight and vice versa with those that had more.

Exercise Is the Key to Cheating the Age Clock

New research from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology’s K.G. Jebsen Center of Exercise in Medicine provides statistical evidence that the 50-year-old can be just as phisically fit as a 20 year old. But couch potatoes need not apply. Exercise — hard and often is essential to truly staying young. Say the researchers from Jebsen Center.

Middle-aged guys can take heart in research from the Center. They have determined that activity is far more important than age as far as fitness levels — and an active 50-year-old can be every bit as fit as a sedentary 20-year-old, says Ulrik Wisloff, Jebsen Center director and principle investigator of the study.

The study shows that by increasing the intensity of your exercise, you can avert the list of diseases that plaque today’s middle aged male.

“Physical condition is the most important factor in describing an individual’s overall health, almost like a report card,” says Stian Thoresen Aspenes of the center.

Training Intensity is Much More Important than Length

Interval training involves performing short periods of high intensity exercise followed by periods of  low intensity exercise of the same length. Such as: Sprint for 1 min. – walk for 1 min. that would be one interval. Depending on your level of fitness to do 3 to 10 intervals and structure them dozens of ways to fit your purposes. Look out for a special report on interval training coming up soon right here.

An interesting new study has surfaced from a couple of years ago that runs opposite of all common sense when it comes to diet and eating in general.

The experiment found that in meeses (mice) deactivating two main genes that are part of the “fat-burning” process, can actually improve energy output and assist in lowering diet-caused obesity. These unusual findings might lead to some new roads in weight-loss therapy. Warm-blooded animals like humans need to constantly “burn fat” to maintain stable body temperature and this is where you have to depart from all common sense.

It is presently thought that a person’s fat-burning ability, called thermogenic potential, is linked to risk of obesity; which means that people with extra thermogenic potential are less likely to get obese. As a matter of fact, bodybuilders and others seeking to burn more fat routinely use thermogenic dietary supplements like the caffeine and ephedra combo that helped so many a few years ago until an ignorant, hysterical press finally pushed an even more clueless Congress to ban it for fat loss.

Anyway, in theory, decreasing thermogenesis ought to increase the odds of being overweight or obese, but Leslie Kozak and fellow scientists at Pennington Biomedical Research Center discovered that this might not be totally accurate. The team knocked-out two thermogenic genes in several meeses (mice), called Gdm (glycerol 3-phosphate dehydrogenase) and Ucp1 (mitochondrial uncoupling protein) then they fed the meeses a high-fat regime while raising them at a cool 20 °C (68 °F).

The mice were in fact very resilient to obesity, which was caused by each mouse’s body actually activating their own much less efficient backup heat generators. Missing the Ucp1 & Gdm, genes which were designed for the efficient creation of heat, mouse white fat cells activated alternative, and more inefficient, fat burning mechanisms. In this case the inefficiency was a benefit, as the mice had to burn extra fat than regular to keep warm like burning more wood on a fire.

Notably, after living for 10 weeks at 68°F, the meeses kept these alternate pathways intact even after being moved to 28 °C (82 °F), which suggests that their bodies had adapted to the adjustment. Accordingly, Kozak and fellow
scientists notice, fat burning will not necessarily require making thermogenesis easier; by making it difficult and forcing the body to employ inefficient pathways to keep warm, the identical targets can be achieved.