Nutrition Archives - Bodyrecomposition

What Are the Real Essential Fatty Acids?

lylemcd — Thu, 09 Apr 2020 18:44:12 +0000

For nearly a century now, we thought we knew what the essential fatty acids were, linolenic acid and alpha-linoleic acid. I’ve written it in my books and in various articles as have many others. As so often happens in science, with new data comes new models. Because it looks like we may have been wrong about what the real essential fats are. As always, let me start with some background.

What is an Essential Nutrient?

Before discussing what the essential fats are or may be, I need to make sure everybody is clear on what an essential nutrient is. Now, this can get confusing since technically there are two different types of nutrient essentiality: physiological and nutritional.

Physiological essentiality means a nutrient is essential for life.
Nutritional essentiality means that nutrient is essential in the diet because the body can’t make it or can’t make enough of it.

I’ve provided the full criteria for an essential nutrient below.… Keep Reading

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Protein Requirements and Connective Tissue

lylemcd — Thu, 06 Feb 2020 18:55:53 +0000

So I’ve written a lot about protein requirements for athletes in my career. It’s a topic I’ve followed with some interest for decades, I wrote an entire book on the topic in 2008 or so. Well guess what I’m talking about again today. Hint: it’s protein requirements for athletes.

Protein Requirements for Athletes

The most recent piece I wrote on the topic addressed a current idea in field where maximal per meal protein intake is about 0.25 g/lb (about 0.55 g/kg). This is based on research showing that this amount of protein maximizes MUSCULAR PROTEIN SYNTHESIS. This is assumed to represent the optimal protein requirement for growth.

Related: How Much Protein Do I Need to Grow?

In the original piece, I gave a number of criticisms of that idea including the following:

Most studies concluding this use whey protein rather than whole food. This not only alters digestion and appearance kinetics but the food matrix is important as the presence of other nutrients and compounds impacts on how foods work in the body.

… Keep Reading

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Why Epidemiology is Crap

lylemcd — Mon, 14 Oct 2019 12:00:34 +0000

Epidemiology is crap.

Epidemiology refers to a type of science that is essentially observational and examines group health. It looks at a group of people, some aspect or aspect of their diet or lifestyle and some outcome such as disease. Then it tries to determine what variable (or variables) of diet or lifestyle correlate with some outcome. And epidemiology is crap science so far as I’m concerned. Now let me tell you why.

The First Epidemiological Study

In college I took a history of medicine class and learned about what I think the first epidemiological study was. This was hundreds of years ago where it was observed that people in one part of a city (in France or England maybe?) got sick and those in another didn’t.

So people wanted to find out why. As it turned out, each part of the city got all of its water from a different well and this was the big variable between the two areas. … Keep Reading

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Dieting and Surgery – Q&A

Lyle McDonald — Fri, 11 Oct 2019 19:08:29 +0000

So in keeping with my attempt to do some short video updates, I want to do a Q&A about dieting and surgery.

Hi, Lyle. Currently reading the awesome Women’s Vol. 1 and PSMF… I am on day 7 of PSMF (Cat 2, 30BMI, 14BF%). Protocol recommends FDB every 2-6s. Since, yes, I did week one wrong using Cat 1, I would like to do a full 3 weeks on diet. Dilemma is I have breast revision Feb 12 and I am required to stop Fish Oil ten days prior. I planned to stop it Feb 2nd, BUT can I continue one more week doing PSMF.

I got this question earlier this year and my answer won’t be helpful to them since their surgery has already passed. But since I often get questions about the topic of dieting and surgery, I still want to address it.

Dieting After Surgery or Recovering from an Injury?

… Keep Reading

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Protein Requirements for Hypertrophy

lylemcd — Wed, 12 Jun 2019 18:31:44 +0000

While I’m working on a few other articles on other topics (including training to failure, the metabolite theory of growth and a detailed examination of what muscular tension is and isn’t), I want to do a quick update on the topic of protein requirements for athletes. This is a topic with literally decades of history behind it.

The Debate Over Protein Requirements

Early on, the debate was primarily between scientists, who often argue that activity did not increase protein requirements and athletes who did (the athletes, to a first approximation turned out to be correct, by the way).

There have also been long standing debates between scientists on different sides of the same debate (some of the big names that will come up in this piece are Stuart Phillips, Kevin Tipton and Robert Wolfe) with some giving relatively lower recommendations (but still higher than the RDA/DRI levels) and others relatively higher.… Keep Reading

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The REAL Explanation for Supercentenarians

lylemcd — Sun, 28 Jan 2018 14:29:49 +0000

For some years there has been a fascination with supercentenarians, individuals greatly over the age of 100. Reasons for their age include things such as diet, environment and lifestyle. But the real reason they *seem* to be so old is likely related to something very very different.

THE TRUTH WILL SHOCK YOU !

… Keep Reading

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An Introduction to Dieting

lylemcd — Thu, 05 Jan 2017 17:46:37 +0000

Right or wrong, the fact is that January is when people tend to kick off their attempts to diet, get fit, etc. Many gripe about this, we can quibble about the relative merit’s of using what is fundamentally an arbitrary date as a starting point but that doesn’t change the reality: the holidays are over and January is when dieting starts (as well, Fat Loss Happens on Monday). For that reason, among others, I’m going to republish a version of something I originally published in 2015.

This is actually an excerpt from the Women’s Book which I’d note has now been split into two volumes (Volume I is one nutrition, fat loss, etc. and Volume 2 will be about training) of which the first is nearing completion (I promise). However, it’s undergone enormous rewriting since I originally published it, including the addition of a completely new section. So I’ve unpublished the original to republish the updated version in two parts over the next two weeks.… Keep Reading

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A Guide to the Glycemic Index and Glycemic Load

lylemcd — Thu, 08 Sep 2016 17:59:06 +0000

Every so often the idea that carrots or some other fairly innocuous food is bad due to a high Glycemic Index (GI) comes through the fitness industry. I can recall seeing it 3-4 times over my career. Invariably this is an overreaction due to not really understanding what the Glycemic Index really represents. So to help clear it up I want to look at the GI concept in some detail along with a related concept called the Glycemic Load (GL). And while I’ve done a full guide to dietary carbohydrates before, I want to start with a quick precis on how carbs are classified in the diet.

Classifying Carbohydrates

How to classify different carbohydrates in the human has been a topic for decades if not the better part of a century (I’m sure it goes back further than this but I’m not sugar historian) and to make this article make sense, I want to blather about the different types of carbohydrates.… Keep Reading

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How Do I Carbohydrate Load for Endurance Events?

lylemcd — Wed, 28 Oct 2015 16:03:24 +0000

Even though I loved lifting weights since I was 15, I have probably been more involved in endurance sports than anything else over my varied athletic career. So I do get questions related to endurance activities and they do interest me. So today I want to look at the question: How do I carbohydrate load for endurance sports?

Specifically, I want to answer the following question:

What does the science say regarding the proper protocol for carbohydrate loading before a goal endurance event like a full marathon? As usual, internet articles are all over the place: some say 2 days, some a week or more, some say keep calories the same but higher carb percentage, some say to jack it up to 5-7 g/lb.

So there’s actually several questions to address here. Before getting to them, let me, as usual, start at the beginning.

What is Carbohydrate Loading?

The concept of carbohydrate loading is fairly simple. … Keep Reading

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Excluding the Middle

lylemcd — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 13:14:25 +0000

This is an article that both does and doesn’t say much. It’s something that I’ll likely link back to a lot in the future so I might as well just put it down once. Want I want to talk about is the common habit of excluding the middle, more formally called “the false dilemma”, the “either/or fallacy” or a whole host of other things. It’s one of those things that I see people using all the time in Internet arguments.

Excluding the Middle

The idea here is that people have a tendency to play this cute little game where a given situation can either be exactly one thing (their preference) or exactly one other thing where that other thing is some ludicrous stupid-ass extreme example that they use to attempt to prove their preference simply by how extreme (and dumb) it is. But compared to something stupid, anything is better by comparison.… Keep Reading

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