The Six Principles of Optimal Health: #2-Avoid Toxins

"There is a growing consensus in the scientific community that small doses of pesticides and other chemicals can have adverse effects on health, especially during vulnerable periods such as fetal development and childhood." 

Andrew Weil

In the first principle of achieving optimal health, I focused primarily on the importance of eating more nutritious foods. After you start to improve the nutrient content of your diet, you then have to start focusing on avoiding as many dietary and environmental toxins as you can. While chronic exposure to individual toxins may not be very destructive to your health, collectively, these toxins can cause chronic stress and/or mess with the proper function of the endocrine system. So even if your diet is 100% on point, chronic exposure to the multitude of environmental toxins typically found in industrialized countries (especially the US) can relentlessly chip away at your health.

Being assaulted by any toxin can cause a stress response as the body detoxifies itself. If you are constantly assaulted by many toxins every day, then you can suffer from chronic stress and endocrine disruption.

•  Chronic stress brings excess cortisol which can strip muscle, increase body fat (especially abdominal fat), cause insulin resistance, sap energy, and suppress the immune system. 
• A malfunctioning endocrine system prevents the body from using hormones correctly to manage essential life processes. 

Both chronic stress and endocrine disruption accelerate the development and progression of disease.

Of course, nature is full of dangerous chemicals. I'm not talking about these natural toxins. I'm talking about man-made dietary and environmental toxins that are a consequence industrialization. These toxins were largely an unintended consequence of the Industrial (both first and second) and Green Revolutions. While these revolutions lifted peasants out of poverty and produced an abundance of calories, it also allowed for the creation of dangerous synthetic chemicals, destructive pollutants, and unhealthy pseudo-foods.

Environmental Toxins

I'll start this section off with a little history. In most industrialized nations, unhealthy exposure to environmental toxins really started with the heart of the Industrial Revolution: The steam engine. For the steam engine to work, it needed lots of heat, which came from the combustion of large amounts of low-quality coal. When this coal was burned, it released toxic smoke and soot, which was disposed of by simply funneling it out of smoke stacks. Unfortunately, this smoke and soot eventually came back down to the Earth, literally turning whole cities black. This smoke and soot also had a terrible impact on the health of people who worked and lived around cities that used coal. (1) 

An artist's depiction of early industrial pollution.

While electricity eventually helped to reduce coal use, some places were slow to embrace this change. (1) This was punctuated in 1952 in London when the pollution from commercial and private coal use, combined with automobile exhaust and very calm weather, produced a thick and persistent 5-day cover of yellow and black tinted smog that resulted in an estimated 12,000 deaths (and over 100,000 cases of respiratory infection/aggravation). (2) 

A London police officer tries to protect himself from The Great Smog with a "smog mask."

The Industrial Revolution didn't just pollute the air, it also polluted water. Of course, humans have unknowingly polluted their water sources with raw sewage for many centuries. Sometimes this pollution was so bad that it led to many outbreaks of infectious diseases like typhoid and cholera (however, the connection between human waste and infectious disease wasn't realized until 1854). 

But industrial waste water was something else, adding both conventional (e.g., oil and grease) and unconventional (e.g., mercury, lead, and cadmium) pollutants into common waterways. By the 1950s and 60s, waster water pollution had gotten so bad in Ohio that the Cuyahoga River actually caught on fire several times during these two decades. In other places, many species of fish became so polluted with mercury that they were unsafe to eat.   

The degree of pollution in the Cuyahoga River was so bad in some places that it could coat a person's hand in oil and grease. These oils slicks would occasionally catch on fire. 

Finally, the advances of the 20th century gave rise to another deadly form of pollution: Synthetic chemicals (e.g., dyes, insecticides, plastics, and fertilizers). Although many of these chemicals have no known effect on human health, a few of these chemicals were found to mimic the hormone estrogen (e.g., PCB, BPA). Unlike natural estrogen, the body cannot control the action of these estrogen mimickers, causing endocrine disruption. (4)

This picture shows how the man-made pollutant polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB) can move up the food chain. As it moves up, it concentrates. This means that phytoplankton will have the least amount of PCBs while the herring gull (or humans) will have the most.

Today, government regulation has reduced or eliminated much of this earlier pollution. And even though air, soil, and water quality has improved, there is still environmental toxins hanging around. Burning fossil fuels releases air pollutants. Residues of banned synthetic chemicals (e.g., dioxin, PCB) are still found in waterways. And endocrine-disrupting pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers pollute soil, water, and food products. Being exposed to any of these toxins on a daily basis can cause chronic stress (and disease) in the body.  

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Success Story: Now Taking Care of My Health

I've always been kind of a pudgy guy.  Even after I joined the Air Force and went through boot camp I could still pinch well over an inch around the ol' midsection.  Even after I had mandatory PT four times a week almost every week during which I ran for miles, did push-ups and sit-ups and jumping jacks in formation; in unison to a four-count bellowed by somebody with all seriousness.  Even in my late teens I was still soft around the middle, and not very muscular.  And so it went, for years and years... seven and one-half years in the Air Force, all the while barely passing my annual fitness evaluations.  I'd cram for each PT test, "study" if you will...

"Crap!" I'd say.  "I have a PT test in two weeks!  I need to get in shape!"

This (obviously) was the wrong approach, but since I spent the better part of the rest of my life trying to decide where and when to eat (largely contingent on who had the best margarita specials, two-for-one coronas, dollar drafts, etc. etc...), my annual fitness evaluation seemed more an inconvenience than anything else.  Come time for me to shine, I'd push, grunt and sweat my way to a barely passing score and then return to my usual loafing.  At the time it all seemed good enough; at least I was having fun.

Years after I got out of the military I was still sort of depending on my youthful metabolism and luck when it came to being "in shape".  Then I started to get fat... and it made me nervous.  I hadn't really changed anything about my lifestyle, but I found myself breathing more heavily, getting winded more quickly, snoring louder, getting tired more...until I was peeking over thirty extra pounds of pudge just to see those little numbers on the bathroom scale.  Not to mention someone was sneaking in at night and pumping a few more psi of air into my spare tire. 

That sneaky bastard!

It was right around this time that I moved to Missouri, where I happened to settle in a few miles away from an old friend from back in the day:  Bryan Mayo.  As it turned out, Bryan had recently become particularly interested in the areas of personal fitness and nutrition.  He began ravenously soaking up information from every possible source and he shared the best points with me as he went, sending me his condensed notes on all sorts of nutrition and fitness books that he had recently devoured.  One such book was "The Paleo Solution" by Rob Wolfe.

"Read it."  he said, with no small amount of conviction.

"Okay."  I replied, since I had no reason not to.

I read it, and between that and Bryan's prodding I finally decided to have a real go at being healthy for a change.  Once I read that book, I understood why Bryan was so passionate about understanding what it means to really be healthy.  I'd been doing everything wrong.  Even the stuff I'd been doing in an attempt to stay reasonably not-too-fat wasn't doing me any good and was actually harming me.  It blew my mind; it was as if I'd tasted the truth and now I wanted more of it! 

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The Squadron Program

Having been in the USAF as long as I have, I'm pretty experienced when it comes to squadron PT programs. From flutter kicks to arm circles to body weight circuit training, I've seen many different approaches to getting a squadron physically fit. While some of these programs were pretty well thought out, quite a few had me asking, "What does this have to do with the PT test?"

The Importance of Training Specificity

Generally, when I ask this question I find that a squadron's PT program is more geared towards getting people to become more active than to efficiently and effectively train them for their PT test. In my opinion, the priority of all PTLs leading squadron PT should be to physically condition its members so that they can easily achieve an 80 or better on their PT test.

This brings me to a critical aspect of any training program: Training specificity. (1) A person's success or failure with any test depends very much on how specifically the training simulated the challenge.

For example, doing nothing but pull-ups will not help an individual with the push-up because the muscles involved in the pull-up have little to do with the muscles involved in the push-up. Training in pull-ups will also have little to no impact on running times because an individual's upper body has little to do with running performance. So, if someone wants to improve their push-ups, then they need to do push-up-style exercises. If they want to improve their run times, then they have to run (or do leg strength exercises).

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How to Build Muscle and Strength, Part 3: Nourishing Muscle

I have massively expanded on this post and moved it to my Mayo's Mind blog.

How to Build Muscle and Strength, Part 3: Nourishing Muscle

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The Six Principles of Optimal Health: #1-Eat more Nutritious Foods

"Obsessed with the idea of the microbe we often forget the most fundamental of all rules for the physician, that the right kind of food is the most important single factor in the promotion of health and the wrong kind of food the most important single factor in the promotion of disease."

Sir Robert McCarrison, MD 

The first principle of optimal health is eating more nutritious foods. While this may seem obvious, the definition of "nutritious" in the US has radically changed over the last century. Initially, minimally-processed whole foods from both plants and animals were advocated. Then, as the Industrial Revolution made its way towards food producers, Americans started eating pseudo-foods like margarine, industrially-produced vegetable oils, pasteurized milk, highly-processed meats, unfermented soy, canned foods, white sugar, and bleached flour. These adulterated foods were cheaper than whole foods and, according the the US Government, seemed to be just as healthy. But these pseudo-foods are not more healthy than whole foods and generally cause nothing but disease.

This post has been moved over to my Mayo's Mind blog. Click on the link below to read the rest of this post.

The Six Principles of Optimal Health: #1-Eat more Nutritious Foods

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Improving Your Health: The First Steps

Now that you've read my 42-Day PT Program  (and hopefully checked out some of my research in my other blog posts), all the lifestyle changes I recommend might seem like too much to tackle all at once. Believe me, this has been very much an incremental process for me and I wouldn't expect anyone to throw themselves completely over the fence right away. Instead I suggest making a few key changes initially and then building on your healthy lifestyle as you go.

While your short term goal is to get higher scores on your PT test, in the long term I think we all want to live healthier lives so that we can be lively and active well into old age. Try to keep in mind that however difficult these diet and lifestyle changes may seem, they are critical to you achieving effortless 90's on your PT test and enjoying effortless life-long health. To me at least (as you can probably tell), the key word is "effortless": It really is, once you get on the right track.

Initial Diet Changes

A few small (but powerful) dietary changes will cause drastic improvements if you are overweight and/or suffering from other physical ailments (e.g., high blood pressure, fatigue, joint pain, mood swings). These are:

Kill all Sugar Drinks

Refined sugars (especially corn syrup and high-fructose corn syrup) are devoid of nutrition and expose your body to excessive oxidative stress. If this stress is chronic, then you can chronically elevate your cortisol levels, which will lead you down the long and painful road to central obesity, high blood pressure, fatigue, insulin resistance, and heart disease. (1)

In the United States, refined sugars supply a worrying amount of calories to the average consumer's diet. As of 2010, it is estimated that they consume an average of 160 pounds of refined sugar per year, which is about half a pound per day (or just over 42 teaspoons of refined sugar)! All of this sugar adds up to almost 800 calories per day, which supplies more than 20% of an average consumer's total daily calories.

When sugar was first refined, it was very expensive to purchase because it was so labor intensive to plant, grow, refine, an distribute. Consequently, not much of it was consumed by the average person. However, as the advances in the Industrial Revolution were applied to the sugar production, the price of sugar dropped causing explosive growth in its consumption by everyone. 

Your first step in removing refined sugar from your diet begins with sugar drinks. These drinks include sports drinks, all juices, sweetened tea and coffee, and soda (both regular and diet). If you still need something sweet in your coffee or tea, try stevia or raw honey.

Cut Back on Bread

Modern wheat breads are brimming with gluten and lectins, both of which can cause health problems (e.g., indigestion, bloating, upset stomach, achy joints, headaches). (2,3,4) Sensitivity to modern wheat can cause a stress response. (5) If you eat wheat every day, then this stress can be chronic. Chronic stress can make it very hard to maintain a healthy weight, much less have enough energy to perform well on your PT test. (1)

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How to Build Muscle and Strength, Part 2: More Exercise Strategy

Because there was so much interest in the last post of this series (it's now my most popular post!), I decided to add some more of the interesting muscle-building exercise strategies that I've discovered during my recent research. The body weight exercises are especially fun!

Overload Training

In an effort to experience maximum intensity, I use a method of overload called max contraction. (1) The basic idea of max contraction is to hold a weight that is between 110% to 120% of your 1-Rep Max (1RM) for no more than 6 seconds. While you are holding this weight, you are keeping it stationary at the most disadvantageous position (usually with a joint at 90 degrees). If a person can only hold a weight for a maximum of 1-2 seconds, then their target muscle group has experienced the most intensity possible.

There are two reasons that I use overload training:

• Achieve maximum muscle fiber recruitment to build strength quickly. (2,3)
• Overcome protection mechanisms in the brain that prevent a person from lifting more weight, preventing a plateau. (4)

Since I concentrate on one muscle group per day, my first exercise is overload. So, if I were doing chest, I would do a few reps of one-arm max contraction dumbbell bench presses (I use dumbbells so that I can spot myself). I take a single 110-pound dumbbell, lie down on the bench, and lower the weight with only one arm (assisted by the other) until my upper arm is parallel with the floor, and my elbow is bent at a 90-degree angle. I hold the dumbbell stationary for 6 seconds. I repeat this with the other arm to complete my set.

This is the one-arm dumbbell bench press. When the weight starts to get heavy, you will have to shift your weight to the center of the bench to maintain balance.

I only go up in weight if I can hold the weight for more than 6 seconds. If I can't, then I will use the same weight until I can hold it for 6 seconds.

This style of exercise is very intense, so you can't do too many of them. I limit myself to a maximum of three total reps per daily workout, giving myself 1-2 minutes of rest between each complete max contraction rep. For example, if I were exercising my back I would use the one-arm pull-up as my overload exercise. After I completed three max contraction reps (or 3 sets of 1 rep) I would then move on to a traditional, heavy, full-range back exercise (like weighted pull-ups).

Max contraction is only one part of my approach to building muscle. When I experimented with this style of exercise, I got stronger, but not bigger. So I use max contraction to help drag my traditional, heavy, full-range exercises up in weight. I then use these heavy exercises (as well as my volume training) to maximize hypertrophy (i.e., growing muscle).

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