J.D. Moyer

sci-fi author, beatmaker

Category: Health/Body-hacking Page 17 of 20

To Bean Or Not To Bean, That Is The Question (Legumes, Lectins, and Human Health)

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On February 15

In Health/Body-hacking

With apologies to Shakespeare.

These days, many people across the world are wondering if they should eat beans, or not.

Right now, this very minute, there are two powerful, but opposing, dietary trends speeding towards a potentially explosive head-on collision.

On the one side the paleolithic (or “Stone Age“) style of eating, a dietary/lifestyle system that eschews grains, legumes, sugar, and all processed foods in favor of quality meats, poultry, fish, vegetables, fruit, and healthful fats.  This is the anti-bean side.

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Great Health Posts from Berkhan, Sisson

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On February 5

In Health/Body-hacking

Two great posts I’ve enjoyed recently:

1) How To Walk The Talk and Unlock Your True Potential
from leangains.com, by Martin Berkhan

Mr. Ripped, aka Martin Berkhan.

Martin Berkhan is an insanely fit Swede who writes about muscle-gain, fat-loss, and metabolic science.  He’s an entertaining, insightful writer who I admire for his critical thinking, skepticism, and intellectual independence.

In the post linked above, Martin discusses psychological issues specific to those of us who are  obsessed with health and nutrition information.  We don’t always practice the principles we preach to others.  Our addiction to health and fitness information can be counter-productive; we’re constantly “optimizing our systems” instead of just sticking with a simple plan that works.

I won’t give away Martin’s solution to this conundrum — read the post!

2) The Unconquerable Dave
from marksdailyapple.com by Mark Sisson and Dave Parsons

Readers of Mark Sisson’s “primal living” site (which features Sisson’s version of the paleolithic diet) often write in and share testimonials and before/after pictures.  I love these posts — it’s great to see the results from people who have given up on the low-fat, low-cholesterol standard diet advice and are taking the paleo path.

Primal Dave!

From the tone and content of Dave’s emails, it seemed like he jumped on the primal/paleo bandwagon and never looked back.  He just stuck with the plan, lost 100 pounds, and reverse-aged.  One can’t help but think “Go Dave!” while reading this post.

How and Why to Balance Fat-Soluble Vitamins

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On January 12

In Health/Body-hacking

She’s probably not deficient in vitamin D.

I admit it, I’ve jumped on the vitamin D “bandwagon.”  I’ve been a part of the “vitamin D craze,” recommending larger-than-RDA doses of vitamin D to my friends and family.  Why?

  • The majority of Americans have low to borderline-low vitamin D levels, due to lack of sun exposure, overuse of sunscreen, overuse of soap (I’ll explain this in a minute), and extremely low consumption of dietary vitamin D.
  • Though most of the evidence is low quality (correlative rather than causative), there is still a great deal of evidence that points to lower risks of heart disease, many cancers, and depression when physiological vitamin D levels are on the high side.

So should every adult be taking 5000IU of supplemental D3 every day?  Absolutely not.

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Three Counterintuitive Ways to Reduce Your Risk of Heart Disease (and Osteoporosis, While You’re at It)

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On December 21

In Health/Body-hacking

Bad for the goose, good for you.

Heart disease runs in my family, like it does in many families.  Few people are immune to the insidious accumulation of arterial plaque.  Known risk factors include smoking, a sedentary lifestyle, age, and type-2 diabetes.  Dietary factors are acknowledged, but there is no consensus regarding which dietary factors are actually risky.  The stale conventional wisdom regarding cholesterol, meat, and saturated fat being bad for your heart is rapidly giving way to a more nuanced view that considers systemic inflammation, blood sugar regulation, and calcium metabolism.  Starchy foods (bread, pasta, rice, potatoes), fructose, and other high glycemic-index foods are now viewed with more suspicion than the once-maligned rib-eye steak and scrambled eggs.  Many doctors still consider arterial hardening to be irreversible, but a new breed of cardiologists has a different view; arterial plaque can be measured, controlled, and even reversed.

What can you do to reduce your own risk of heart disease (or even reverse it if it has already progressed)?  Well, don’t listen to me — I have no medical credentials whatsoever.  But you might talk to your doctor about some of the evidence presented below.

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Willpower as a Commodity, Part III (Thought Vaccines)

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On November 18

In Health/Body-hacking, Metaprogramming

Keep reading … it will makes sense.

In my earlier posts in this series, I wrote about the idea that willpower is less a muscle we can strengthen, and more a limited resource that we need to spend wisely.  If we spend our day doing taxes (difficult), we’ll have less energy at the end of the day to resist sweet desserts or other temptations.

We all “leak” willpower to some extent, wasting our daily supply of mental fortitude on battles like staying awake when we’re sleepy, resisting food cravings, making ourselves do work we don’t want to do, enduring annoying people, etc.  If we take proactive steps to either change our lives or establish new habits, these “leaks” go away and we’re left with more willpower to work on whatever we really want to work on (making art, earning money, fixing stuff, improving the lives of others — whatever our “life’s work” happens to be).

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