Hello everyone.

Wow! What a week. I still haven’t processed it all. I’ve read about a million things, it seems, so next week I’ll provide links to those articles I thought best.

Usually I start this newsletter with a greeting. It get’s me started, so I don’t have to stare at a blank screen. But I’m going to try something different this time. I'll provide a summary of what’s to come below. Let me know if you like it.

There are many benefits to donating blood; I’ll discuss one no one else has. We’ll go through some poll responses and an email dealing with variable resistance training, niacin, and a few miscellaneous topics. Then we’ll take a look at the difficulty Big Food has of providing bread to the millions in the face of the anti-processed food movement. We’ll hit on the satiety index of food, an idea that is much in the news today. We’ll move on to luxury beliefs followed by a video and discussion of a new paper on trapped fat.

Benefits from Blood Donation

MD and I both donated a unit of blood last week. As I’ve discussed in earlier issues of The Arrow, there are advantages to giving blood. One of the main ones is getting rid of excess iron, which most of us probably have…unless we live in some country where malnutrition reigns.

For most of our existence on the planet, humans have struggled to hold onto our iron. Prior to widespread sanitation, we were riddled with parasites, most of which consumed our iron. And we endured much more trauma than we do now, so that was another source of blood and iron loss. Consequently, we evolved methods of tightly hanging on to our iron.

Now that we’re parasite free and aren’t subject to the same degree of trauma, iron buildup can become problematic. So, it’s nice to get rid of it in a win-win way by donating blood periodically.

But there is yet another reason to give up your blood.

All of us have stored in our fat multiple pollutants of one sort of another. We’ve been exposed to these pesticides, herbicides, and God only knows what else for years. Many of them have been banned, so we’re not continuing to build up levels, but it’s almost impossible to get rid of those we still have stored.

Plus, there are always new ones coming on the market that will no doubt be considered harmful and some point in the future and banned. Most of these organic pollutants are fat soluble and get stored in our fat cells.

The human body is designed to cling on to fat. We have no way to get rid of it other than burning it off. But even burning it off leaves these persistent organic pollutants (POPs) with us as they’re simply picked up by other fat cells and remain in our bodies.

Over time, we can slowly get rid of them through sweat and even hair, in some cases. But it is a slow slog. And if we’re taking in more at the same time, it’s difficult to lower the overall total.

If we fast, our fat cells give up their fat. It goes into the circulation and is used by the cells for energy. When we eat, we add new fat to the blood stream, which ends up back in the fat cells along with other fats that might be circulating.

We can dump some of these POPs through the bile and other yet to be identified pathways into the small intestine. But unfortunately, they get picked back up again by the enterohepatic circulation and dumped back into the blood. As I wrote above, the human body loves its fat and wants to salvage as much of it as possible.

One way you can get rid of these POPs and other fat-soluble pollutants is to give blood regularly.

To get rid of the maximal amount, you need to fast overnight and right up till the moment you give the blood. That will assure the maximal concentration of POP-containing fat in your blood. You need to give whole blood, not just red blood cells. You need to drink plenty of water. You don’t want to be dehydrated, as that makes it more difficult for the phlebotomist to find a decent vein to plumb.

If you give blood regularly and follow the above instructions, you can slowly but surely reduce the burden of POPs.

But what about the people getting the blood you donate? Won’t they end up with the POPs themselves?

If I were in dire need of blood, the last thing I would worry about are the POPs that might be in the blood I got. I would just be happy to get it. Plus, anyone who has lost a unit of blood requiring replacement has already lost an equivalent amount of POPs, so basically they are just getting a replacement, not an extra dose.

Poll Responses and Email

Slow Burn vs Variable Resistance Home Training

Here is an email I received that I’ve heard echoed in a few poll responses and a comment or two.

I’ve written about this previously, but since I’ve gotten so many poll responses, comments and emails, I thought I might revisist.

As most of you probably know, MD and I co-wrote a book on slow-motion strength training called Slow Burn with a New York trainer named Fred Hahn. When we were approached to be co-authors, and I was skeptical of the claims of this type of strength training. But after I did a deep dive into the exercise and strength-training literature, I realized my skepticism was unwarranted.

I discovered there was a lot more going on in strength training than just becoming stronger. Muscle size, density, and vascularity are improved. And, surprisingly, so is flexibility and endurance. And I learned that there is a systemic training effect, in that you don’t have to work out every single little muscle in the body to strengthen those muscles. Working and strengthening the large muscles has a sort of carry-over effect on the rest of the musculature.

The most exciting thing I discovered was that there really is no such thing as cardio-pulmonary improvement with training. At least not where the heart and lungs are concerned. After you’ve trained strenuously for a period of time and have become able to work out hard without gasping for breath and having your heart beat out of your chest, it isn’t because your heart and lungs have improved. They basically stay the same. Your heart may have a bit of increased vascularity because it, too, is a muscle. But essentially these organs stay the same.

So, what happens? Why are we able to do so much more exercise after a period of training than we were before if our heart and lungs haven’t improved?

The reason is that the vast majority of fitness improvement (if that’s what you want to call it) takes place because of improved transfer of oxygen into the cells.

When you are unfit, your cells don’t require a lot of oxygen transfer. Being sedentary doesn’t put a lot of oxygen-transfer stress on your body. The pathways enhancing the speed of transfer are lazy simply because you haven’t needed them, and the body is pretty frugal with resources, so it doesn’t spend a lot of effort keeping the enzymatic transfer pathways running at warp speed.

So, if one day you decide you’re tired of being sedentary and decide you’re out of shape and are going to start running, you’ll discover on your first jog around the block that you end up gasping for breath with your heart pounding. And it’s not because your heart is out of shape or your lungs don’t work well. It’s because you are not transferring oxygen well at the cellular level.

You are huffing and puffing because your lungs are trying to suck in as much oxygen as possible while your heart is beating as fast as it can to transport this oxygenated blood to your cells. The issue is your slow transfer of oxygen to the cells. Your heart and lungs are doing their best to get as much oxygenated blood to your cells as they can so that more can be transferred.

When you “get in shape,” your heart and lungs haven’t changed all that much, if at all. What has changed is your body’s ability to transfer oxygen to the working cells. That will have increased markedly. Now when you jog around the blog or a mile or whatever, when you return, your heart rate is up a bit and you’re breathing a little more rapidly, but it’s nothing compared to what it was before you started training.

It’s natural to think your heart and lungs have improved, but the reality is that what has changed the most is your ability to transfer oxygen, which is the real definition of fitness.

Once I realized this, I came to learn that the best way to bring this about was strength training. Even aerobics, jogging, and all kinds of similar activities bring about their benefits by making you stronger.

So if becoming stronger is the goal, the best way to do it is by adding stress to your large muscle groups. And the best way to add stress is to push these muscles against an opposing force. The best way to do that is to lift weights.

Then I learned that the best way to lift weights is to do it slowly. The reason that works so well is that lifting slowly removes momentum from the equation.

Think about lifting a weight over your head, an overhead press. You start out with the bar held by both hands at about shoulder height. Then you push it above your head. Then you bring it back down to shoulder height. And repeat.

If you carefully watch most people do this, what you’ll see is that they bend at the knees a bit and forcefully thrust the bar over their head. They add momentum, which helps them get the bar up. Then they rest the bar on their extended arms, which removes stress from the muscles. Then they let it drop back down letting gravity assist. Rinse and repeat for however many reps.

Doing this exercise slow-burn style involves moving the weight up slowly with no momentum. It takes 20-30 seconds to get the bar fully to the top, then you don’t rest, you spend 20-30 seconds letting the bar slowly come down. As you can imagine, this puts much more stress on the muscle than does using momentum to get it up, letting it rest on your extended arms, then letting it fall.

Consequently, slow-burn style strength training increases gains more rapidly than standard weight training. Multiple studies have shown this nicely.

But another variable comes into play.

When a muscle contracts, it gathers strength. In other words, when you start an overhead press, your muscles are not contracted. And at that point, they are basically at their weakest. If you’ve ever done an overhead press, you know that the most difficult part is right at the start. Which is why people resort to using momentum to getting it going. You’ll also discover that once you get the weight started upward, it becomes easier to lift as the muscles fibers are getting more contracted and thus stronger.

All of which creates a problem. If the hardest part is getting the lift started, then, unless you use momentum, you have to use a weight that is lighter than what is required to really put stress on your contracting muscle.

Almost all trainers who use the slow-burn technique have specially made machines that are designed to keep continuous stress on the muscle all the way through the lift. In our overhead press example, the machines would put less force on the muscles while just getting started with the lift and then increase the stress as the muscles contract. This process is called variableresistance. Variable resistance works out the muscle through its entire contraction, which leads to much faster gains in strength.

Using these specially-cammed machines, trainers can gradually increase the weight over a period of time to rapidly improve strength (and flexibility, blood flow, and everything that goes along with increased strength).

Problem is that for the person who works out at home these machines are hugely costly. Regular Nautilus-type machines don’t have the special cams required for variable resistance, so if you purchase a $2,500 set up that has a dozen different exercises, you’re not getting variable resistance. It’s just like lifting weights, but a bit more convenient.

Which is why I’ve gone to using a band workout. Bands require more pressure to stretch the more they are stretched, so they do provide a variable resistance workout. And at a fraction—and I mean a small fraction—of the cost of a true variable resistance machine. And they don’t require much space.

If you do go to a trainer with a bunch of these variable resistance machines, you can do a slow-burn workout with gradual increases in resistance. With a band workout, you don’t have that ability unless you have a zillion bands that can give you increased resistance bit by bit as your strength improves.

The way you work with bands is to increase the number of repetitions with a particular sized band until you reach 40 reps (with the system I use). Then you go up to the next band size and start with as many reps as you can do and work to 40 from there.

You can still do the bands slowly, so you get the benefits of slow motion training, but the reality is it is virtually impossible to generate momentum with a band, so that problem is taken out of the equation. I simply do as many reps as I can, then collapse in a heap. Rest a bit, then do the next exercise.

There is a large body of research out there showing that sedentary people, weekend athletes, and elite athletes all develop strength more quickly with bands than those same groups using standard weight training. A nice book on the subject is titled Weight Lifting Is a Waste of Time, written by the guy who developed the system I use. It’s a great book discussing many of these studies, some of which I found years ago when writing Slow Burn. But let me warn you, do not be seduced by the title. It makes it sound like the alternative to weight lifting is a piece of cake. Nothing could be further from the truth. Band workouts are brutal. I hate them. I dread them. But the results are nothing short of phenomenal.

Just don’t believe for a second that they’re easy.

But this is why I’ve switched from a true slow-burn style program, which is, itself, pretty brutal. I can get the variable resistance with the bands, which are inexpensive and portable. But, don’t misunderstand me. If you have the proximity and availability of someone like Fred at your disposal, I encourage you to take advantage of it.

More on Niacin

I got the following in a poll response:

This reader is correct in that this is not a paper out of China. But it is a paper showing the results of only a handful of subjects followed for less than a year. One group of subjects have a disease, an adult-onset, disorder of mitochondrial myopathy, which translates to a disease of genetic origin in which the mitochondria in the muscles don’t work well. As the authors of the article put it

In this case, the disease arises as a deficiency NAD⁺ , which can be relieved by niacin supplementation. The folks suffering from this disorder were given niacin in pharmacologic doses as were the control subjects, who did not have any mitochondrial issues.

Over the course of the study, those with the disorder tended to improve whereas the control subjects pretty much remained the same in terms of the various parameters evaluated.

The poll respondent stated that the control subjects experienced “increased muscular strength” as did those with the mitochondrial myopathy. You would expect those with the disorder to improve when their NAD⁺ levels were returned to more normal numbers.

If you look at the graphics from the study, you can see that the control subjects experienced the same changes as the hogs did back in the day when farmers switched from raising swine for lard to meat. As I discussed in an earlier Arrow, in the 1940s people began eating more pork and using less lard, so farmers began raising pigs for meat instead of lard. When they did so, their feeding regimen changed. (And they changed the breeds of hogs they raised from lard hogs to meat hogs.)

There was no question that increasing the niacin in the feed led to increases in muscle mass, but it also increased fat as well. Which was all gravy, so to speak, to the farmers as they were paid by the pound.

There are many graphics in this paper, and you can see them all by clicking the link in the quote above. I want to look at two, however, that tell the story.

First, let’s look at what happened to muscle mass.

The control (normal) subjects are in grey on the left; the subjects with the mitochondrial disorder are in the reddish orange on the right (there are two groups as the subjects came from two different places).

The researchers showed the results as fold changes, which means if whatever they were looking at doubled, then it went up by two fold. Same in the downward direction.

As you can see, the muscle mass in all subjects went up, with the diseased subjects outpacing the normals. But these folks were a bit low to begin with. But there is no question the normals went up by maybe 0.04 fold, which I wouldn’t consider a major gain, but it is a little.

Now take a look at what happened to visceral fat.

Both groups gained visceral fat, but take a look at the normals in the grey on the left. They increased visceral fat by about 0.35 fold (by my eyeballing the graph), which is about ten times what they gained in muscle mass. If you look at the previous chart, you can see that the scale on the left is much different.

As much as I might like to experience a 0.04 fold increase in muscle mass by simply taking a supplement, I wouldn’t do it if it meant I was going to increase my visceral fat by ten times as much. That is a true Faustian bargain.

Perhaps this increase in visceral fat as a consequence of increased niacin intake is why people who take niacin end up with increased insulin resistance and glucose intolerance, both of which are driven by increased visceral fat.

And it’s not as if taking large doses of niacin are without symptoms. In terms of side effects, here is what the authors reported:

There were five study subjects in this experiment and ten controls. All had issues of one kind or another, and, apparently, three dropped out, which is 20 percent of them. So, buyer beware.

This reader might be better off to belly up to the bar and pay 16 cents per day to learn how to interpret studies better. But you can lead a horse to water and all that.

I had a number of positive comments in the polls about the TB video. I didn’t realize how many people out there had tested positive for TB, so for them, it was highly interesting.

Also had a lot of compliments about MD’s Caesar dressing with the best being this one.

And my favorite about my trying to persuade MD to make some sourdough bread for me out of non-enriched flour:

Which is almost to the word what she told me herself. She is a great cook; I am a kludge. I don’t even know what that word means, but the sound of it represents my culinary abilities. So, it’s only fair that we have a division of labor. No luck so far, however, with the sourdough bread.

Speaking of bread…

Is Bread an Ultra-Processed Food?

Not long ago, the Wall Street Journal published an article (from which the above image was taken) titled “We Bought This Bread in April. It Still Looks Fine.” The main thrust of the article (free link above) is that mega bread bakeries are in a real dilemma. What with all the sudden interest by the public in ultra-processed foods and label reading, large commercial bakeries are fighting the battle between reducing the number of ingredients in their loaves and reducing shelf life.

Let’s take a look.

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