The Digest - May 5

• 5 easy ways to be more mobile in the office and avoid sitting for long stretches.
• Adding potassium to a high-sodium meal reduces negative effects, or you can just use real sea-salt!
• Women and heels… I’m treading lightly on this one… no pun intended!
• Are e-cigarettes putting newborns at risk of reduced brain development??
• I hate when athletes skip this specific warm-up before a hard workout!
• Don’t knock it till your try it!

• I keep harping on about this and will continue to do so: sitting for hours on end at work or at home will have serious deleterious effects on your health, EVEN if you work out regularly. Multiple studies have shown that people who exercise regularly but sit all day are LESS healthy (based on a range of metrics) than people who barely work out but move around all day long. In fact, given that my new “day job” requires me to be in a high-rise with limited opportunities to be mobile, I’ve just bought myself a fitness tracker to make sure I move enough during the day (in addition to my daily workouts). This article presents 5 easy to implement and useful tips to be more mobile in the office.

• Salt gets a lot of bad rep in the media (and in many medical circles as well), and in some cases for good reason: excess sodium does have negative effects on health, increasing risks of renal disease and cardiovascular disease (by increasing blood pressure). However while most studies agree that “salt is bad”, I’ve argued many times in the past that the “salt” used in these experiments is “table salt”, which has a much higher sodium content than “real sea salt”, in which the sodium content is balanced by a higher availability of a variety of other minerals. One such minerals is Potassium, which is critical in the body’s ability to manage Sodium levels and keep them in an optimal range. This new study further confirms this phenomenon by showing that adding potassium to a high sodium meal will reduce the negative impact of sodium on the function of your arteries. In practice: just use real sea-salt (unprocessed, unbleached and with no anti-caking agents added) and you’ll get the full mineral profile your body requires to function properly.  

• Women possess a higher tolerance for pain than men, this has been demonstrated numerous times in various studies… But one particular (and daily) example is women’s ability to withstand the pain from wearing high heels daily. The selfish part in me didn’t want to write this post since… well let’s admit it: heels do emphasize certain, ummm, esthetics… BUT, the caring part in me says: this new study by Stanford University shows a link between wearing heels and increased risk of knee osteoarthritis.

• This is scary: more than 40% of pregnant women believe that e-cigarettes are safer than regular cigarettes. This is a common public misconception with potentially dangerous consequences (as I had discussed a few weeks ago). The lack of smell and smoke somehow gives people a false sense of security, even though the nicotine content in e-cigarettes is just as high as in regular cigarettes, and nicotine has been linked to reduced brain development in newborns.

• Athletes I work with often skip the “pre-main set” I assign in a workout (ok not all of you, but you know who you are!). What’s the “pre-main set”? It’s effectively an additional warm-up which follows the normal 10-15min warm-up, and it consists of very short bouts (30-60sec) of high intensity efforts with full recovery. I incorporate those before every “hard” workout to prime the muscles and circulation / lymphatic system for what’s coming. This new study published in the In’tl Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance provides further evidence in support of this approach: a high intensity warm-up routine results in improved performance in subsequent high-intensity efforts / workout. I strongly encourage coaches and athletes to incorporate those into routines.

• In a long-standing experiment at the beginning of the 1900s, 2 doctors went almost a year eating nothing but meat and developed no ill consequences whatsoever. One of the most shocking revelations was that they didn’t even develop a vitamin or mineral deficiency, which is surprising to most people given that we’re driven to believe that most vitamins and minerals come from plants (I suppose the Inuit people didn’t get that message). What many people don’t know is that organ meats (liver, kidneys, heart) have very high concentrations of vitamins and minerals, including vitamin c! Anyway, the only reason I bring this up is because people balk at the idea of eating organ meats, which are the most nutritious meats an omnivore human can consume, so here’s a link to a recipe for liver which I recently tried and it’s absolutely fantastic! I did replace the cardamom with sumac though (personal preference). Feel free to experiment. Oh and remember, buying organic is much more critical for organ meats than regular meats.