Ground Up Strength

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37364783/ns/health-diet_and_nutrition/?GT1=43001

too bad those things that went to 0 grams can still have .5g in them. the donut is still a donut…reminded me of this that i saw today:

http://brianstpierretraining.com/index.php/if-you-love-steak-read-on/

amazing how most doctors work. and sad.

As soon as I saw "Center for Science in the Public Interest" I thought, "there goes the science". Something I mentioned in a blog post recently…the .5 grams is for all fats, not just trans fats. People have acted like the FDA just invented that regulation for trans fatty acids but that is how fats are listed and it fits with the reality of the situation because it is not exactly simple to pin down fat content to the nth degree and most people would just be confused by such precision.

Something that we have to be careful with, in articles like that, is terminology. For instance, they mentioned that the researchers examined margarine. Although margarine is associated with trans fat a product made with trans fat is not the definition of margarine. It could be many things made with many different ingredients and just the term margarine does not tell you what you are dealing with. This is kind of like the term "shortening". Shortening means "short fat". We think of shortening as trans fats as well and "Crisco" comes to mind but technically butter is a shortening and so is lard.

The second thing you linked brings up a huge pet peeve of mine and I just mentioned this in a blog post as well. In fact Jamie Hale and I went into a big search for a "study" that some article mentioned without ever giving the name of the study or providing any reasonable info to help someone find that study. It was difficult for me to track it down but once I did we found out that the "conclusions" of the article had very little to do with the study.

I don't want to criticize Brian St. Pierre because I don't know much about him but talking about a study being talked about by the WSJ is, to me, a big waste of time. Find the study and talk about THAT. Otherwise it's all hear-say. Newspapers like that rely on brand recognition. You hardly ever here of a study that was NOT done by a "Harvard professor" or a "John's Hopkins" professor, for instance, in a newspaper like that. Have you noticed this? But you know how many hundreds of studies there are out there on this same subject of processed meats, versused "red meat" in general? Done by people from institutions all over the world. Some of them well known and some you never heard of. But what journal? How do we read them? Not what university the guy works for who did the study.

Jumping to conclusions about Pomegranate juice is a bit early and the sad fact of the matter is that some people with high blood pressure do not respond to dietary intervention. When did trainers become medical experts? When did this happen and was I asleep? It is easy to sit on a high horse and say "eat your vegetables" and drink some juice when you're healthy. Walk a mile in someone else's shoes and you may just find out that your simple and pat little world is just that…simple and pat. It is a stereotypical and unfair assumption that every one who uses drugs to to help control blood pressure just went right to pills and make no lifestyle modifications. Yes, statins and such are dangerous but try being told that you are at major risk for a coronary event and yet have all your effort at a health lifestyle make very little difference to that particular risk factor.

To be honest it's only those people who have never had a major health challenge that think everything is so easy. That is not meant as a valid argument against any one persons claims because I don't think it is a valid argument. But it gives a glimpse into certain attitudes and the problem is most people take information at face value. Well, a twenty something dude in the prime of his life is going to have a slightly different attitude than someone who is on the other side of middle age and just got home from the hospital.

i believe brian has a degree in nutrition…so not just a trainer. and this is the first time i've responded to a post and IE hasn't put ads in the middle of the reply box :) woohooo!!!

here's the abstract:

http://circ.ahajournals.org/cgi/gca?gca=CIRCULATIONAHA.109.924977v1&sendit=Get+All+Checked+Abstract%28s%29

here's brian's info:

Brian St. Pierre is a Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist (CSCS) and Certified Sports Nutritionist (CISSN). He received his degree in Food Science and Human Nutrition with a focus in Human Nutrition and Dietetics from the University of Maine.

not that that excuses his eat vegetables and drink pom juice….but…he isn't just a trainer. it hits home with me…mom has high cholesterol…and in our family…at least through my grandma…her high cholesterol resulted in her having some arteries cleaned out. but grandpa had low cholesterol and a heart attack. and i've watched my mom literally do…not much about it…for a long time…same with her osteoperosis…and same with dad's high blood pressure….and both were offered drugs rather than lifestyle changes. just sad.

Not that I care about his credentials like I said I wasn't wanting to criticize him per se but simply the practice of talking about an article about a study that is never really pointed to in the article. But, Pity, there is no trainer out there who is "just a trainer", lol. Everybody has "credentials" and none of them make them right or wrong. A guy with no degree has just as much a chance of giving good advice as a guy with degrees and if you look at the credentials without considering the arguments you set a trap for yourself. However, I will take such credentials as a clue that a person knows the difference between a primary source and some quotes alluding to a primary source.

It's not the problem that I'm denying it's the high horse attitude that people bring to this stuff. Oh..it's oh so simple. Let me frame this a different way. Is a "certified this and that" going to take your relatives in hand and coach them through all these various changes they need to make? Is a certified whatever going to feed them Pom juice and shove EFA's down their through, monitor them and mentor them? People have the choice between going to an "alternative health care" provider of some sort and being fed snake oil and miracle cures based on shoddy science, pseudoscience, or just a complete lack of understanding of what science tells us. OR they have the choice to go to a doctor who may only give them some drugs but said drugs have a better chance of being effective than said snake oil. The OTHER alternative is is self education and making the correct changes yourself. But look at the timeframe involved to get to that place. Lots of these healthy habits are preventative habits. Prevention is not cure. Reversing something after the damage is done is much different than avoiding it.

People rarely look at these things from a doctor's perspective, some of which DO suggest healthy changes and DO embrace alternative medicine when they think it is sound and valid (my doctor for one). But guess which profession has a patient who will live or die based on their care and which has a "client" that will not get their "fitness", "strength" or "fatloss" results based on their advice?

I seriously think it would be a good thing for some people giving out "medical or healthcare" advice to maybe do a simulated internship such as an MD has to do. See what the 'real world' is like. It's easy to criticize things you don't know much about. This is why I try not to criticize MD's as much as I criticize CSCS's…lol.

You know I think what I'm really talking about here is value statements and value judgments. Look at how this works with food. BOTH the articles linked in this thread contained a food value label. In one, donuts were characterized as 'gluttonous' food. Now, food cannot be gluttonous. One donut does not a glutton make but only people can be gluttonous. So, what is the value statement aimed at? Donuts are food. Just food.

Processed food is not processed food. It's processed SHIT. Who eats shit? Why, only an idiot would eat shit. You don't judge food, you judge the people who eat the food.

Bad food versus good food is not something that really helps people eat better. By labeling food we label ourselves. We assign negative or positive value judgments to the food and therefore to ourselves. The worse you feel about yourself the worse things you do to yourself. You punish yourself for being bad and "reward" yourself for being good.

You know there have been studies carried out try to determine whether physicians negative attitude toward obesity compromises preventative care. Well here is the thing, "preventative care" in medicine is really screening and then suggesting based on that screening. Here's the results of the test and here is what we suggest based on that test. You can perform tests and interpret the results while still having all the judgmental attitudes you want. Nothing has to be compromised and the studies have not indicated that these attitudes result in a difference between care of the obese and care of the non-obese.

But you cannot extend that to the fitness industry. The fitness industry is almost set up for people who don't really need it! Ah, you've been eating trans fat, processed shit, and "gluttonous" foods. Your own indiscretions put you here. It's your fault. But hey, I feel sorry for you. It's sad, dude, sad. Here's what you need to do….

A couple months down the road we have failure. Oops, YOUR FAULT AGAIN.

Back to this business of how the "traditional" media covers science. I was going to write up some posts on this but if I can find somebody who already did it better I'd rather link to that. Right on time comes some posts from A Blogger and the Clock by Coturnix (don't know full name yet). This is a really cool blog and is chock full of scientific info by a generous author who also works for PLOS. He offers everything for for open access. That makes us sympatico and it allows me to include some excerpts here.

So check out Why Some Scientific Coverage in the Media Sucks. I changed the title a bit there. And be sure to check out the previous post which he links in the first paragraph or so. That discusses the linking to original papers issue I discussed above. These post really cover the issue thoroughly. I think he puts a bit too much faith in science bloggers and a bit too much pressure but that's OK. I'm not a science blogger so I can deal, lol.

One of the main thing he points out is that science bloggers tend to report science much better than traditional media. Which is for sure the truth. Once reading this you will see why I reacted so strongly to a "blogger" reporting on a "paper" based on media coverage of the paper rather than the paper. Especially relevant is this passage about quotes which is a subject near and dear to me:

Quotes - even the shortest article will have a brief quote from one of the authors and/or another scientist in the field, as well as sometimes another scientist who is a naysayer or skeptical about the results. Names of these people who are quoted are usually completely unfamiliar to the lay reader, so invoking them adds no heft to their claims. This is pure
"HeSaidSheSaid" journalism and, again, a colossal waste of space. Not to mention that there are no links to the homepages or Wikipedia pages of these quoted scientists for the audience to see who they are. And we know that a cherry-picked quote that does not link to the entire transcript or file of the interview is a huge red flag and sharply diminishes reputation and trust of the reporter and the media outlet.

Why don't science bloggers quote other scientists? Why should they? A science blogger is simultaneously both a reporter and a source. If there is a new circadian paper that I find interesting enough to blog about, I am both reporting on what other scientists did AND am a source of expertise in evaluating that work. Why quote someone else when my entire post is essentially an interview with myself, the expert - not just a quote but the entire transcript? The chances I will get something wrong about a paper in my own field are tiny, but if it happens, other people in the field read my blog and they will be quick to correct me in the comments (or via e-mail, yes, it happened a couple of times and I made corrections to the posts). Why add redundancy by asking yet another expert on top of myself?

The posts also go into the importance of context. The stuff that comes before…all those other studies I talked about.

Context - there is no space for context in a short article. Yet it is the context that is the most important part of science coverage, and of science itself - remember the "shoulders of giants"? Placing a new study within a historical, philosophical, theoretical and methodological context is the key to understanding what the paper is about and why it is important, especially for the lay audience. Even scientific papers all provide plenty of context in the Introduction portion (and often in the Discussion as well) which is sprinkled with references to earlier studies. Taking papers out of isolation

It is a bit worbly and would benefit from getting to the point more quickly but take the time to read through all of it.

Bump you bastards. Hey this is the first time I've ever bumped something in the GUS forum.