Food craziness, part 4

If you assume from the previous posts that a low level of IGF-1 is a good thing and that a low level of methionine leads to a low level of IGF-1, but a diet that has the bare minimum of methionine in it is not reasonable (and if you're growing or pregnant it definitely is not), you might wonder if there are ways to remove methionine from your bloodstream once you've eaten it.

Interestingly, that's letting IGF-1 do it's job! It facilitates transport of amino acids like methionine from the blood into muscle cells. The way to take advantage of this is through exercise. If you exercise a muscle to failure, you deplete its energy stores; if you then ingest sufficient carbohydrates, the cells store additional energy as glycogen. If you also supply it with protein, the cells can grow and divide and you are depleting the blood of methionine by building muscle. [If you try to deplete the muscle again before resupplying it with fuel, it fails.] This helps to explain the longevity attributed to regular strenuous exercise.

One way that has been shown to dramatically reduce blood IGF-1 levels is intermittent fasting. The liver contains enough glycogen for one day of fasting. On the second day, proteins (particularly enzymes with rapid turnover) are degraded to amino acids and converted into energy, with methionine being converted in part to glucose. On the third day, structural proteins (such as muscle tissue) start getting degraded and the body makes dramatic adaptations to using mostly fats for energy. This process does deplete the blood of methionine and lowers IGF-1, but the effect is temporary. It does suggest, however, that glycogen depletion through exercise will also have this effect.

If one is eating a ketogenic, low-carbohydrate, Atkins-type diet, one may not have enough carbohydrate in one's food to replace the glycogen used by muscle during exercise. These diets are quite high in protein and the protein will supply that glycogen in a process like the one described above, but is unlikely that the level of methionine can be lowered significantly with these diets.

If the level of protein (and hence methionine) is high enough that there is still an excess after the needs for muscle growth and glycogen storage are met, the remainder is converted to fat. This process, too, decreases the level of methionine in the blood, but is certainly not the preferred method for health. Stored fat can only be utilized aerobically - and it takes a lot of exercise to burn a significant amount of fat - so aerobic exercise is another tool to be used.

Finally, some recommendations

This all pulls together into advice you've heard repeatedly:

1) Limit intake of animal products and increase the amount of fruits and vegetables in your diet.
2) Do intense vigorous exercise regularly and get sufficient rest between bouts of exercise.
3) Do a lot of long slow aerobic exercise.
4) Get all the nutrients you need, but don't overeat.

Food craziness, part 3: of tiny mice and men

(a digression before I get back to exercise)

Have you noticed that large breeds of dogs don't live as long as smaller breeds? There seems to be some connection between growth and longevity. A lab strain of mice was developed that lacked one gene involved in growth, Insulin-like Growth Factor 1 (IGF-1); it is a dwarf strain that unexpectedly lives 40% longer than average. This one gene may be very important for longevity, but the exact reason why is not entirely clear. [The obvious experiment of testing methionine restriction or caloric restriction on IGF-1 deficient mice has not been done.] There are humans who also lack this gene, called Laron dwarfs; the largest population of them are in Venezuela, coincidentally near the Vilcabamba valley which has been renowned for long-lived residents. Laron dwarfs appear to never get cancer or diabetes. They do not, however, have unusually long lifespans, due it seems to poverty, alcoholism and obesity.

In part 2, I mentioned methionine restriction diets and here I'm bringing up growth factors - two very odd subjects - and the two may be related. Insulin and IGF-1 are similar in structure, have similar cell receptors and have overlapping effects. Insulin causes sugars (and to a lesser extent) amino acids to enter muscle cells and IGF-1 appears to cause amino acids (and to a much lesser extent, sugars) to enter muscle cells, effects necessary for growth of muscle cells. Experimentally, low levels of methionine appear to cause low levels of IGF-1, which should mimic the health benefits of increased longevity through decreases in cancer and diabetes. As Laron dwarfs show, it is not sufficient however to ensure longevity; other diet changes and exercise are also necessary.

The very illnesses to which Laron dwarves seem to succumb appear to be prevented and even reversed by very low fat diets. The first major proponent of a diet both low in protein and fat was Nathan Pritikin, who ironically died at 70 after commiting suicide because of side-effects from hairy cell leukemia chemotherapy. His diet of 80% carbs, 10% protein and 10% fat was found to be too difficult (too tasteless) for most people to follow. Dean Ornish has since shown that heart disease can be reversed with this diet, while the most recent books from Pritikin's health center now advocate a much higher protein diet. The China Study suggests that it is not fat intake that correlates to heart disease, but intake of fat from animal sources only; clinical evidence for this is sketchy.

There is one group with a diet averaging 12% protein and 13% fat and which gets plenty of exercise that still does not have extended healthy lives, the Raramuri (commonly called the Tarahumara) of Mexico. There are stories that they used to live longer, but times have changed (one specifically says "since they started planting soybeans"). Reports from the 1960s suggest the elderly ate a diet similar to the elderly found in "Blue Zones." A study of the diet of their famous distance runners showed that they ate an average of 2818 calories per day (at an average height of 5'6" and weight of 135 pounds), consisting primarily of corn, beans, squash and squash seeds, citrus, tomatoes and other vegetables (not named in that source) and that they had adequate daily intakes of all vitamins and minerals (though only 800 mg of calcium and the 1 microgram of B-12 seems impossible given no animal products commonly eaten).

The Tarahumara diet appears to be very low in methionine (maize is uncommonly low among grains), but the quantity of food eaten to get all the other nutrients causes the total methionine level to exceed that threshold for lowered IGF-1. If the calories are decreased to 2000 or fewer, their diet becomes very similar to what I gave in part 2 as a low-methionine diet.

A low calorie, low protein, low fat, near-vegan diet might make sense if one is elderly, but it makes no sense if one is growing and active. There may be a way to mimic and extend the diet effects of methionine restriction with exercise. That will be the focus of the last part of this series.

Food craziness, part 2

In the 1930's it was found by accident that underfed lab animals lived longer. Since then, it's been shown to be true for every species studied and is assumed to be true for humans; the mechanism isn't known, but one theory is that slowing the growth rate causes DNA replication to be slower than DNA repair and this decreases cancer rates due to errors in replication. This caused a group of people to try it for themselves in a program called CRON (caloric restriction with optimal nutrition). The leader of this movement was Ray Walford, best known for Biosphere 2, who ironically died of cancer a few years later.

Only recently has there been a lab study where underfeeding did not increase life span. The only difference between this study and others was the sources of the foods consumed. Typically, after establishing diet criteria, one uses the cheapest food available, but this study followed a procedure close to what the CRONies did, choosing foods by nutrient density and this change seems to be important.

Reductio ad absurdum

I decided to find the foods with the fewest calories that would have all the nutrients necessary (using my current age and weight for a reference, where that would make a difference). I could do it on 1168 calories, in a diet that does not look particularly appetizing:

1/4 tsp. iodized salt
3.2 oz. can Atlantic sardines
1 c. cooked spinach
1/4 c. raw sunflower seeds
1 1/2 c. raw (medium firm) tofu
1 1/2 c. raw cremini/portobello mushrooms
4 shiitake mushrooms
1 c. cooked lentils
1 c. raw (green) bell pepper
2/3 c. sun-dried tomatoes
1/2 c. wheat bran

This diet turns out to get 34% of its calories from protein and 43% from fat. A very large percentage of the carbohydrates are fiber. This makes it an extremely low carb diet. [For reference in the following discussion, this diet contains 1900 mg. of methionine]

It may be the method of obtaining "optimum nutrition" that made the difference in this study, as the amount of fat and protein is much higher and the amount of carbohydrate is much smaller than in the other studies. As those societies studied who live longest had only 10-15% of their calories from protein and 10-15% from fat, the CRON group may have chosen the wrong foods. It is not the calorie restriction itself that seem to be important, but restriction of some nutrient, for increased longevity.

Which nutrient(s) might be crucial? The difference between the studies suggested that it was one or two of the 9 essential amino acids and the leading candidates were methionine and tryptophan. A quick survey of foods shows that restricting one of these is indistinguishable from restricting the other. One questionable animal study has recently shown that it is methionine restriction that is crucial for lifespan extension. Interestingly, methionine restriction is sometimes used with cancer patients to starve rapidly growing tumors.

A very BIG "however"

 It is essential to ingest methionine in order to live. The challenge, then, is to find a diet that supplies adequate, but minimal, methionine (the exact amount is debatable, but 600 mg/day is definitely too low and 1200mg/day is probably too high), and has everything else in abundance. Here's food groups ranked by methionine content:

very high: meats, fish, poultry, eggs, milk and dairy products
high: grains and legumes
moderate: nuts
low: vegetables
very low: fruit

The reason for the long-lived groups mentioned in part 1 having near-vegan diets suddenly becomes apparent in this context. If one tries to create a diet that is low in methionine, one starts with fruit and one quickly discovers that some nutrients are very difficult to get in adequate amounts, such as calcium, zinc, riboflavin and linoleic and linolenic acids. Adding foods that are high in these creates a new problem: excessive copper and (especially) manganese.

A 2000 calorie diet that meets the requirements:

11 cups of water
1/4 tsp. iodized salt
1/4 oz sunflower seeds
1 Tbsp. (whole) sesame seeds
2 tsp. flax seeds
1/2 oz. almond
1 Tbsp. sunflower or safflower oil
3/4 c. cooked beans (lentils, black beans, pinto beans)
1/2 c. raw onion
1c raw asparagus (or other green vegetable: cucumber, bell pepper, celery, endive)
2 Tbsp. tomato paste
1/2c. canned turnip greens (or collard or mustard greens)
2 oz. (dry measure) brown rice
1 1/2 c. cooked white rice
 2 Tbsp dark molasses (Brer brand)
1/2 c. cooked white button mushrooms
 banana (7 inch)
navel orange
1 oz. dried apricots
apple (3-3.5 in.)
1/2 c. raw firm tofu
1 c. raw broccoli
1 oz. oats
baked potato with skin (2 1/4-3 1/4 inch)
carrot (medium)
Vitamin B-12 supplement
Vitamin D supplement

This diet is remarkably similar to the one suggested by Mark Fuhrman in his book "Super Immunity," though he came about it in a completely different way, starting with antioxidant content (he would avoid the white rice, molasses, oil and probably the potato and supplements, though I couldn't do that without obtaining dangerous amounts of manganese).

The diet above is about 20% fat and only 10% protein, which is probably the absolute bare minimum of protein possible. It has 900 mg. of methionine.

The thing not being considered here, however, is exercise (animals that are underfed tend not to move very much). That will be the focus of the next part of this series.

This post just needed a photo (copyrighted, used without permission)

Recreating the racing community #2

[I keep rewriting this, because I make a circular argument. I'm hoping it pulls together later.]

Running is thought of as an individual sport, but it takes more than one person to have a race.

To create a new racing community, it will be necessary to bridge the gap between competitive racing teams and social running clubs. There is currently a team road racing circuit in Minnesota, the teams being largely centered around businesses and with members who only see each other at races. There are also a large number of social running groups, who meet to run together on a regular basis, but whose members, if they are preparing for races, are preparing for different races with a wide variety of goals. There are a few exceptions; the Team USA Minnesota men's and women's teams have members who train together often with the same goal (making Olympic teams) and there are two groups I know of consisting of men over 50 years old who compete in the local team circuit and who train together regularly. The Northern Minnesota Track Club was a competitive team in the 1980's, became a social club in the 1990's and now has a low-key presence on the state team circuit (where races are largely held 200 miles away from them) and has their own events in the Duluth area.

A club typically consists of 5-7 core members who train together because of proximity and shared interests, plus another 5-7 that are variable (often coming from a much larger pool of dozens). The core group meets regularly, generally weekly, for a fast social run. It is at these meetings that ideas on training get shared, plans for future races get consideration, camaraderie develops... and often a meal is had after the run [This allows the fastest runners in the group to interact with the slowest, if they get separated during the runs, which commonly happens]. Teams often have one dominant personality, usually someone experienced but past their racing prime, who decides when and where they'll meet and where, how far and how fast they'll run; sometimes this person is a coach.

It is the formation and retention of these clubs that is a critical factor in having a racing community. What is needed is a place on the internet for people to find possible training partners, based on where they train and how far and how fast they would want an organized club run to be. Currently, there are some teams registered with USATF-MN with contacts listed, but there needs to be a simple way for others to be created, without that formality. In the early days of racing, when you saw someone finishing close to you in race after race, you knew that they probably lived (or worked) near you and that you probably trained similarly; you'd strike up a conversation and usually you or the other racer were already in a club and you'd join forces - or become rivals (or both). Today, those who organize the teams that are competitive in the state race series recruit those who finish fastest at their races but are unattached; they do not, however, have much contact outside of the races.

The reason I think these club teams are necessary should become apparent in the next post.

Creating a New Racing Community #1

When I started running, I saw the same faces at every race. There were about two dozen races that attracted a large number of serious competitors and far more that might have a ringer or two, but were mostly local events. With the running boom of 1978-1985, there were ever more races trying to get ever more entrants and that killed the sense of community among racers. First, there were so many races that the number of top runners got diluted between them. Second, the big races became HUGE races, where the 50-100 serious competitors were lost in the sea of 5000+; I remember finishing races and running straight to my car to beat the traffic of the thousands of runners behind me, instead of hanging around to chat with my competitors like I had only a few years earlier.

The increased number of entrants caused prices to skyrocket. First, there was a simple time factor; Grandma's Marathon used to shut off its clock after 4 1/2 hours - which was common - but catering to thousands of 6 hour marathoners meant paying police officers for more hours. Second, slower runners require more assistance; there had been 10 mile races without aid stations, which was possible only when there were 50 runners and none finished in over 75 minutes; they also wanted transportation between the start and finish. Third, slower runners were more demanding and choosier; top runners often say "what do I need another T-shirt for?" while those for whom a marathon was a once in a lifetime thing wanted a lot of swag and would decide against a race because another had better stuff to give out. Fourth, there were costs strictly based on size; for example, parks permits cost less for small groups (at one time, St. Paul charged nothing for events with fewer than 150 people). With increased costs, racers did fewer races, decreasing the odds of running against those they considered their competition.

When competitive runners stopped being able to race against each other on a regular basis, all that became important was finishing time; you might not be able to race against someone, but you could still compare your time in one race with theirs in another. This, however, meant that races had to be certified - and flat. Variety disappeared from races. Attempts were made to get the top local runners in the same races; the USATF MN and MDRA created championship races for several distances, team championships and so on, but this only attracted the very few who had a chance to win awards and the vast majority of competitive runners found they had ever fewer reasons to train and race hard.

Five years ago, I thought that there was a way out of this quagmire by running trail races and I became one of the founders of the UMTR and their series of trail races. Trail races seemed to have the same people at every event - here, at last, there appeared to be community! Unfortunately, the vast majority of these runners were not competitive; most were running ultramarathons and one cannot truly race several ultramarathons each year. All that mattered was finishing and enjoying oneself (nothing wrong with that in itself!) and, excepting a few who a chance at winning, these differed little from social training runs.

I've retired from racing. There just isn't anything in them for me anymore. I outlasted my sport by decades and have accepted my role as an "elder statesman," an old crank complaining that things aren't like they used to be.

The racing community could come back; you don't know what you missed. I'll try to explain how to do it in the next few posts.

West Side Stairs Challenge

Saint Paul is a city of hills and it used to be a city of stairwells, but these steps have been disappearing at a steady rate. The iconic Wabasha bluff steps ("Green stairs") disappeared in 2008:

This year, the Snake Hill steps were removed: [All Google maps deleted 5/19/2013 from post]
I decided to create a challenge to climb all the remaining public access steps on the West Side, which is becoming easier every year. And, of course, I had to make it a real challenge... trust me, it's harder than you expect, but not for the reasons you'd expect. Here's the rules:

1) You must climb the following seven sets of steps:
A) Raspberry Island to Wabasha Bridge steps.

There are multiple interconnected stairwells, but you need only do one. You also do not need to do the steps on the south end (though you can; running down the ramp and up the steps only adds a minute):

B) Terrace Park Steps
These go from the east end of Delos Street to Isabel Street.

C) Bancroft Steps
These go from the corner of Bancroft and Cesar Chavez to the corner of Prescott and Woodbury.

D) Baker Rec Center Steps
This short flight is on the line of Morton Street between Waseca and Bellows. There are two parallel flights, one of which is blocked at one end and in disrepair; you only have to do the new steps, on the south side of the park building.

E) Boys and Girls Club Steps
These very short wooden steps are on the east side of the field connecting the corner of Belvidere and Woodbury to the corner of Belvidere and Brown. These aren't technically public steps, but they make one of the following rules challenging, so they're a must.

F) Morton Steps
These are on the line of Morton Street between Robert and State. They have been rebuilt since this photo

G) Belvidere Steps
These  go between the corner of Belvidere and Waterloo to Belvidere near the highway bridge.2) You cannot traverse any section of your route twice. This means you cannot backtrack (and you cannot cheat by claiming running down the slope next to the steps you go up is a different route) and you cannot repeat any section of road/path/alley you use.

3) Once you start, you can use no navigational aides, such as maps, global positioning systems or written sets of directions. GPS is allowed to measure distance covered only; it cannot be used to locate or give directions.

4) You must start and end at the same place.

5) For fastest known time, total elapsed time from start to finish is used. My route was just over seven miles and took 63:02, with a long wait for a train.

A word of advice: plan to do it twice. Unless you plan very carefully, you will find it necessary to break one of the rules, so a "dry run" is a good idea.

I have fast friends

Their reports aren't posted yet, but Sea Legs Girl won her inaugural 100 mile race and Steve in a Speedo won his first duathlon.

My week was full of fluids. Besides snow and rain. There was blood, mucus, pus and other delights. I'll save you the details.

My first week of recovery from the failed 50K and switching to 1 Mile went as follows:

Monday (64 degrees) 3 miles in 23.5
Tuesday (64 degrees) 6 in 51 with 3x1200 in 5:13, 5:10, 5:00 - 400m (2:20). Very slight wheeze in third rep.
Wednesday (37 degrees, blowing snow) 3 in 23.5
Thursday (41 degrees) 6 in 53.5
Friday (30 degrees, rain and snow) 0
Saturday (48 degrees. Overdressed - full sweatsuit) 6 in 51.5 with 1200 in 4:33, 400 in 75 (downhill, with wind and probably short), 400 in 87 (uphill, against wind).
Sunday (42 degrees) 9 in 81 with 8x100 in 20.5-100(55sec); last 2 in 15:02.

That puts me in 5:50-6:00 shape for 1 mile. I need to be about a minute faster before I race and I'm not sure I have it in me any more.