I was just on firefighting course which entailed entering an 800deg F hot box, moving through the rooms and putting some water on the fire. The operation took about 10 minutes and I lost a couple of kilos. Mouth and throat went so dry as I was climbing down into the box I couldnt swallow. Was having trouble standing when I got out and saw big blue spots in front of my eyes for about 30 minutes, but it was worth it to lose the weight.
Seriously Pritikin is the way to go. Brain burns carbs through glycolysis much cleaner than protein or fat. Exercise burns off the fat and protein away from the brain and helps keep the brain healthy. Excess iron buildup in organs can be problematic as we age. Gains from a high red meat& fat diet are only temporary and you will pay later.
There are a few other benefits from exercise. [Why Exercise Is Good Is Finally Being Understood
One sure giveaway of quack medicine is the claim that a product can treat any ailment. There are, sadly, no panaceas. But some things come close, and exercise is one of them. As doctors never tire of reminding people, exercise protects against a host of illnesses, from heart attacks and dementia to diabetes and infection.
How it does so, however, remains surprisingly mysterious. But a paper just published in Nature by Beth Levine of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Centre and her colleagues sheds some light on the matter.
Dr Levine and her team were testing a theory that exercise works its magic, at least in part, by promoting autophagy. This process, whose name is derived from the Greek for “self-eating”, is a mechanism by which surplus, worn-out or malformed proteins and other cellular components are broken up for scrap and recycled.
To carry out the test, Dr Levine turned to those stalwarts of medical research, genetically modified mice. Her first batch of rodents were tweaked so that their autophagosomes—structures that form around components which have been marked for recycling—glowed green. After these mice had spent half an hour on a treadmill, she found that the number of autophagosomes in their muscles had increased, and it went on increasing until they had been running for 80 minutes.
To find out what, if anything, this exercise-boosted autophagy was doing for mice, the team engineered a second strain that was unable to respond this way. Exercise, in other words, failed to stimulate their recycling mechanism. When this second group of modified mice were tested alongside ordinary ones, they showed less endurance and had less ability to take up sugar from their bloodstreams.
There were longer-term effects, too. In mice, as in people, regular exercise helps prevent diabetes. But when the team fed their second group of modified mice a diet designed to induce diabetes, they found that exercise gave no protection at all.
Dr Levine and her team reckon their results suggest that manipulating autophagy may offer a new approach to treating diabetes. And their research is also suggestive in other ways. Autophagy is a hot topic in medicine, as biologists have come to realise that it helps protect the body from all kinds of ailments.
The virtues of recycling
Autophagy is an ancient mechanism, shared by all eukaryotic organisms (those which, unlike bacteria, keep their DNA in a membrane-bound nucleus within their cells). It probably arose as an adaptation to scarcity of nutrients. Critters that can recycle parts of themselves for fuel are better able to cope with lean times than those that cannot. But over the past couple of decades, autophagy has also been shown to be involved in things as diverse as fighting bacterial infections and slowing the onset of neurological conditions like Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s diseases.
Most intriguingly of all, it seems that it can slow the process of ageing. Biologists have known for decades that feeding animals near-starvation diets can boost their lifespans dramatically. Dr Levine was a member of the team which showed that an increased level of autophagy, brought on by the stress of living in a constant state of near-starvation, was the mechanism responsible for this life extension.
The theory is that what are being disposed of in particular are worn-out mitochondria. These structures are a cell’s power-packs. They are where glucose and oxygen react together to release energy. Such reactions, though, often create damaging oxygen-rich molecules called free radicals, which are thought to be one of the driving forces of ageing. Getting rid of wonky mitochondria would reduce free-radical production and might thus slow down ageing.
A few anti-ageing zealots already subsist on near-starvation diets, but Dr Levine’s results suggest a similar effect might be gained in a much more agreeable way, via vigorous exercise. The team’s next step is to test whether boosted autophagy can indeed explain the life-extending effects of exercise. That will take a while. Even in animals as short-lived as mice, she points out, studying ageing is a long-winded process. But she is sufficiently confident about the outcome that she has, in the meantime, bought herself a treadmill] Of course the morgue is full of middle aged men in jogging shoes so in later life exercise needs to be sensible. 'paleolithic diet' wasnt the life span 35yrs then, so dont expect evolution to help you at 65. Aussie scientist at Harvard named Divid Sinclair isolated the chemical out of red wine that extends life. Called it Resveritrol and startd a company. Resveritrol is a chemical all living things produce when under stress, as in humans in the calorie restriction diet. It targets the surtuin genes. Glaxo Smith Cline came along and bought the company for $720m to get their hands on Resveritrol. They have since ditched Resveritrol in favour of a drug they developed which is 1000 times more potent. Currently going against diabetes2 with it in a phase 3 last I checked. You can buy Resveritrol on the internet.
