Discussion: A hypothetical question

Given the amount of random discussions there have been on attackpoint recently, I figured people would enjoy discussing this question :) It came to mind on a run yesterday (the day after halloween) after possibly having eaten quite a bit of leftover candy...

Scenario =
Person A: runs/bikes/does strength etc. and is generally active say about 8 hours a week. However they eat poorly (think eating at a fast food joint every day - and choosing the big mac, not the healthy option ;).

Person B: is very sendentary (has a desk job, drives to work), however they eat a balanced nutritious diet.

Which one is healthier, which one is fitter???

My thought was that while person B is "healthier", person A would beat them in a race so is therefore "fitter". However, how much does exercise reverse the negative effects of diet (if at all) in terms of health, and how much does a healthy diet improve your fitness (if at all) if you are sedentary?

My thought healthy diet cannot improve your fitness without actual workouts. It's same as watching exercises on TV and doing nothing:)) Can this improve your fitness?! Nope.

If you get enough exercise, you can eat whatever crap you want. Provided you get enough of certain nutrients, of course (we don't want you coming down with scurvy or beriberi). When the fire burns hot enough, any fuel will do. The cubicle dweller subsisting on brown rice and fresh vegetables will not fare well down the line, while the Swampfox who chows down on pizza* every day approaches invincibility. Consider the people who do serious Arctic treks: they subsist on a diet that is made up almost entirely of butter (this is true!).

On the other hand, you might want to think long and hard before you put much credence in advice on training or diet that comes from the likes of J-J.

*To be fair, I've eaten Swampfox's pizza, and it's actually very healthy stuff, made from fresh, natural vegetarian ingredients. Although there are those who would still bemoan the cheese. But it's certainly healthier than the pizza I just ate for lunch!

Ahhh yes, The Cheeseburger Paradox. Even Einstein couldn't figure this one out.

Isn't that a Jimmy Buffet song?

I'm with JJ. In rural Ukraine, the women live about the same length as women in the US, with incredibly poor access to modern medicine. Why? Because they have to work so darn hard to get the food they eat and clean and mend etc... Fairly regular exercise I'm convinced is what keeps them ticking.

While not on the same topic as food vs. exercise, in Ukraine, exercise makes up for the lack of medicine.

(On the other hand the men die much earlier than their American counterparts, due to a fairly heavy load of tobacco, alcohol, and generally being much lazier than the women in Ukraine... I wonder how much of this explains the (smaller) men/women life-expectancy difference in the US?)

Danelle Ballangee (top female AR) is quoted as eating a lot of fast food because it gives her a lot of calories and fast. I like her statement because it can justify my crappy diet and my bad fast food habits.

Example.

Coming back from the 1996 NAOCs in St. Louis I came dead last in the 7th heaven eating contest. 7 treats for 77cents. A burger, hot dog, fries, shake, ice cream cone, ice cream sandwich and a coke. Chad Spence inhaled the food before I was finished my second item.

After an AR event a few years ago my team had a McDonalds cheeseburger eating contest. It got gross when the two finalists were at number 12. I stopped at 6. It would have been more interesting with a Royale with Cheese.

If you train hard and don't get enough vitamins/minerals, your immune system and recovery in general will suffer.

If you train really hard, your immune system and recovery in general will also suffer. But if you only have one eye, you are a cyclops.

Hammer, is the Royale with cheese an intentional pop culture reference? or do we canucks also call them by that name?
Which movie has a dialogue about Royale with cheese?
Who knows?

It also has one of my personal favourite lines, " My girlfriend is a vegetarian so that pretty much makes me a vegetarian, too."

Is a Royale with cheese the same as a Castleburger?

Royale with cheese comes from the movie Pulp Fiction, directed by Quentin Tarantino. It's the European equivalent of a Quarter Pounder with Cheese, according to hitman Vincent Vega

See http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0110912/quotes

QPCs rule!

Royale with cheese comes from the movie Pulp Fiction,

Correctamundo!

This is actually pretty timely because just today scientists from the Goddard Space Cadet Center (where Big Eddie works) have announced that they believe they have detected traces of the first Big Macs dating back to the time of the creation of the universe. It's on the front pages of readworthy newspapers all over the country. This is cutting edge science!

My experience is certainly that activity trumps diet. I've known some very good athletes (Jonathan Boyer being the best example) who were very strict with their diets. Most of the pros I know don't take it too seriously. Greg Lemond told me once to just take a multi-vitamin every day and eat whatever was around. He felt the effort/stress of trying to eat well when constantly traveling to races was counter-productive. Of course, it should be noted that I'm talking here about people who train 30 hours a week, not 8. Since cutting back to my current schedule (which is still a lot by AP standards), I do need to watch what I eat.

I think Lemond's recommendation of a multi-vitamin is crucial - enough exercise will protect you from a lot of the effects of dietary excess but it won't do much to save you if your diet is so awful that you develop some vitamin or mineral deficiencies. Granted, that has to be a pretty awful diet if you're eating enough to fuel serious training but people have done stranger things.

BTW, someone else must have seen sample daily menus Tour de France riders get from their team chefs during the race. I'm thinking Eric must have known Greg when he was younger, hungrier and less pampered.

Heh, yeah. Fortunately I don't work at Goddard (I'm up the road a piece at STScI). I saw that article in the headlines yesterday. The result they are speaking of is an *exceedingly* difficult measurment to make, and they are very likely wrong. I walked down the hall here yesterday afternoon and asked some smart people about it. One of them knew the guy who refereed that paper for Nature. The ref (Ellis) recommended AGAINST publication, but the Nature editor overruled.

Here is Ellis' quote from the CNN article:

"An astronomy professor at the California Institute of Technology who was not involved in the study cautiously agreed with Kashlinsky's conclusion. In a commentary published by Nature, Richard Ellis wrote, "Even a minor blunder in removing these foreground signals might lead to a spurious result," but he said in an interview that Kashlinsky's team did the best job it could given the constraints of the technology used."

This is a huge understatement. I feel more the way Ned feels about it:

"Ned Wright, an astronomy professor at UCLA, was more doubtful. He argued that the process of removing the radiation contribution of other stars is too imprecise to make the team's conclusions valid, and that the measurement it saw is not the signal of ancient stars.

"I'm very skeptical of this result. I think it's wrong," he said. "I think what they're seeing is incompletely subtracted residuals from nearby sources."

Its more than just subtraction of the foreground signals. There are all manner of systematics in detectors that have to be accounted for, and IR detectors in particular are sensitive to all kinds off small variations. I spend a large fraction of my time working on these very things with the IR detectors on Hubble. A whiff of this idea blew through the 'tute earlier this year. One of my bosses asked me if I thought it would be possible to make such a measurement with our camera. I laughed.

The Spitzer instrument that this "result" is based on is called IRAC and is sensitive to light in the ~3-10 micron wavelength range (called mid-IR). The NICMOS detectors on Hubble are sensitive in the 0.8-2.5 micron range (called near-IR). These detectors are extremely sensitive to small voltage changes, temperature, temperature and alignment of the spacecraft optics, previous observations (yikes!), spacecraft attitude and attitude history, date, time, etc. The list goes on and on. In fact the detectors heat themselves simply by operating.

And there are all kinds of natural things that have to be accounted for. We sit in the middle of a big, dusty solar system, variations in dust desity from place to place in the solar system varies with spacecraft pointing. Outside of our solar system we sit in a huge, extremely dusty and gassy galaxy, with all kinds of variations from that stuff. Observing farther and farther into the IR you become more sensitive to lower temperature stuff.

To prove a measured quantity as small as what they are claiming will require a *huge* effort to control for all of these effects, many of which they probably didn't even think about and certainly couldn't do in a 4-page Nature article. A first-attempt at a measurement like this should have gone to one of the regular astrophysics professional journals before going to such a public one as Nature is. Quite frankly, Nature is losing its credibilty by publishing questionable results with shock-value that 3rd rate news orgs like CNN jump all over. Nature, like any other magazine, runs on subscriptions, and the best way to get subscriptions is to advertize. Science should not be driven by the need to increase subscriptions. Note that the headline just above this on cnn.com was "Glued to toilet, man sues Home Depot"

TDF menus (and the pro-cycling lifestyle in general) have come a long way in the last 20 years. Rider's used to joke that the soup served every night was stored in the gas tank of the sag wagon. Numerous protests and a few outright strikes from the riders during the 80's finally forced organizers to start treating the athletes less like coal miners and more like the media superstars they were all becoming.

The three major changes that I can see are:

1) A dramatic reduction in stage lenghts which allows the riders to get more sleep. Interestingly, the organizers fought this one the hardest because they felt the TDF might lose its rep as a killer race. Bernard Hinault's famed quote was "dead legs make for dull racing." And he was right. The shorter stages are much more interesting because lesser riders have a chance to mix it up.

2) Big improvement in the amenities such as food and loging.

3) Serious drug testing. This is what the organizers got in return. Their argument was that if you guys are getting more rest and better food than you shouldn't be needing to take all these recovery drugs. In 1988, the field threatened to strike if the dubiuos positive on Delgado was upheld. In 1997, when the Festina team was busted en-masse, they threatened to strike if something wasn't done about it.

Of course, since I never raced in Europe, all this is heresay, but it's from pretty reliable (mostly first-hand) sources.

I think Person B, as long as they are simply sedentary and not overweight or obese, are healthier. But that Person A is fitter. Fitness and health are two different things, and there is more to health than just physical health (emotional health, mental health etc.). Of course it is just a simple hypothetical question, but I would be asking - why is Person A eating all the crap - are they too busy (perhaps stressed?) to take the time to slow down, relax and eat right? If so, that is not a "healthy" situation in the broad sense. Here's a good example - we have heard stories about high performance gymnasts or figure skaters who have done nothing but train 6 hours a day since age 9, make it to the Olympics, win Gold, retire at age 20 but they are social vegetables because they've never even been on a date or had a beer and cheeseburger - is that "healthy"?

What if, hypothetically, a person has had a beer and a cheeseburger, but very few dates. Would said hypothetical person be half-healthy or half un-healthy?

Well this thread allows me to now advertise that Dr. Mark Tarnopolsky of McMaster University will "very likely" (>90% certain) be giving a presentation on "Nutrition for endurance sport training and racing" at the National Winter Training Camp in Hamilton in January (5th-8th). More details on that camp will be posted on another thread later today but it is now open to ANY member of COF and USOF.

Dr. Tarnopolsky was a former North American Cup Ski-O Champion and top Ontario duathlete and is currently southern Ontario's top ultra distance trail runner and one of Canada's top adventure racers.

He runs a neuromuscular clinic focusing on the issues surrounding nutrition, metabolism and neuromuscular disease at McMaster University.

If you haven't heard him speak before you should!
Not only does he know the science behind nutrition better than almost anybody but he is also an athlete so he will provide real examples from races.

Details here shortly.

The camp is sounding better and better! I suppose it is pretty clear that it is all in moderation. The best option for health might be halfway in between: a decent amount of exercise and a decent diet. But for fitness maybe it is not so clearly defined?
Do you think that those athletes out there who eat poorly, or maybe event decently but not perfectly, would improve their performance by simply changing their diet?

Very interesting, Eddie!

Salal, I think the main points have been stated here pretty well. If you're an endurance athlete with no weight problems and you're doing a lot of training, you'd actually have to go out of your way to have a diet so poor that you were seriously deficient in some of the necessary minerals and nutrients, etc. If all you ate was pork rinds washed down with Diet Coke, well, that might do it. A daily multi-vitamin is cheap insurance, just in case. Taking a bunch of other specialized vitamins is most likely a big waste of money and may actually do more harm than good. And then there are a few things that might be worth actively worth avoiding--trans fats, hydrogenated fats, etc., are what I have in mind. It's a subject that's easy to go overboard on or make much more complicated than is necessary.

The best option, of course, is to eat good food and get a lot of exercise. Neither one excludes the other!

While I agree with the multi-vitamin rule, I suspect the combination of pork rinds, Diet Coke and multi-vitamins might not quite be enough either.

As for multi-vitamins, I take a Centrum generic, and add some extra C & Co-Enzyme Q. I really don't know if the latter two help at all, but it seemed to be the concensus recommendation of a long supplementation discussion on baoct.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/baoct/message/749

And quoting my favorite email of the thread (Nik Weber) (since it may be restricted viewing?)

In the world of elite endurance racing (triathlons, tour de france, marathons/ultras, etc.), EVERYONE in the front of the pack takes supplements. And a lot of them. Some guy in the TDF last year got stopped at the border with like 40-50 different things in his car. I personally think some help and some are horsecrap. E-caps, the company that sells hammer gel, has a big huge list of other things they also sell on their website along with rationale (pretty much scientific) behind each.
Personally, (not like I beat anyone or anything, but I've done a lot of research) I take Vitamins C and E, up to 3-5000 mg and 800IU daily, and Selenium 200 mg because the central valley (and hence our vegetables) is deficient, every day unless I happen to be moving and can't find them in all the boxes. The e-caps Premium INsurance Caps are good too, but expensive-- multivitamin/mineral. After a run I take e-caps products: tissue rejuvinator, super AO (antioxidant), race caps (coenzyme Q10), hammer pro whey, and maybe some electrolytes, all mixed in orange juice. I am pretty much totally off Ibuprofen with this regimen. During a race or training I drink a complex carb mixture with lots of electrolytes, but a lot of people take a bunch of supplements there too. All these I have distilled from the horsecrap out there and found what worked for me. e-caps helped because they will give you your money back if a product doesn't work (I seem to be allergic to their endurance caps). They have specials every once in awhile, let me know if you're interested and I'll see if they have any in the current newsletter. There are also other companies selling the same type of stuff, Succeed sells cheaper electrolytes and carb drink mix.
FWIW, I am a believer in CoQ10, and C and E-- I did research on them in school with a guy who studied with Pauling. He used to take 16g of C a day and said he hadn't been sick in 20 years. He also consumed a lot of THC, so maybe that helped....
You should also eat healthy and lose weight, but I can't because I'm addicted to McDonalds. Maybe I could sue them....

I'd say it mostly depends on who dresses better.

I use another source of vitamin C: every morning I drink homemade juice - a squeeze of half a lemon in glass of water.

I'd go for homemade THC juice any morning... afternoon...

Nature is losing its credibilty by publishing questionable results with shock-value.

Yeah. What with all those pack formations.

To many variables and definitions. What is "fit", what is "healthy"? If you are healthier do you live longer, sick less, no aches and pains. Is the fittest the fastest.? How do you define fitter? Are rowers fitter than skiers, fitter than runners or skaters?
I have observed one thing among many of the younger Oers, defining themselves as "vegetarian". Then boiling a pot of pasta. "vegetarian" , it seems to me means vegetables, which pasta may only because it is not made from animals.

I think vegetarian just means no meat (and vegan means no eggs or milk either). What you're talking of sounds more like paleo-diet, which is styled as being what people ate before agriculture. (So, fruits, vegetables, tree nuts, but no grains.)

The "paleo-diet" is also sometimes referred to as the "hunter gatherer" diet. That has a nice ring to it. The idea is to avoid processed foods. Quite frankly, if you buy the premises of "Guns, Germs and Steel", it seems rather silly to avoid grains...

People eat animals, plants, and rocks. The only rock we eat is salt. So you have to look at this in the "animal, mineral, or vegetable" context. Vegetarian is the opposite of carnivore (meat-eater). Most people are omnivores, who eat "everything". But the basic point is that, as everyone knows, spaghetti is a vegetable.

Coach, at least one of these questions is very simple: if you are caught and devoured by the attack badger, it is fitter than you; if you escape the attack badger, then you are fitter than it. And if the attack badger's mouth should become stuck on the Mark 1000 Saegermeister shoes you are wearing, the smart thing to do is to discard the shoes and get the hell out of there while the gettin' is still good.

I am not sure why you are critical of the practice of first boiling pasta. Have you ever eaten unboiled pasta?

Btw, as a fun fact, if you live nearly exclusively off of pasta, then you are a pastatarian.

Aaah. But what if you were also a follower of Bob Marley (or I guess more correctly Emperor Selassie)? Would you be a Rastapastatarian? (and what if you were also in a local Rotary club....?)

So after viewing the pasta video, obviously smuggled out of Italy sometime during the Great War, I conclude spaghetti grows on trees, or that nice Italian family was undecortaing their Christmas bushes.
Anyway, I'm just saying one cannot live on pasta alone.
As for the attack badger, what do they eat? Let me guess, errant and slow orienteerers..........
Who said I was critical of boiling pasta? The only people I know who eat raw pasta are Sam and Hill, and they're a lot fitter than I am, Hmmmm...........

Regarding "Guns, Germs and Steel" I remember it saying that grains were a competitive advantage for societies rather than for individuals, i.e. just because sedentary agriculture made larger populations, sophisticated administration, standing armies, etc. possible doesn't say anything about whether grains should or shouldn't be avoided for optimal nutrition. Last I heard, it was still the consensus based on studies of remains that hunter gatherers were taller and healthier than contemporaneous neolithic farmers and it's only relatively recently that people in developed countries have become as well fed (and, these days, overfed and underexercised) as hunter gatherers.

Yes, average height dropped significantly upon the advent of agriculture. No competitive advantage either for those allergic to grains or their byproducts (1-2%).

I've seen rocks other than sodium chloride eaten, like dolomite, which is supposedly good for getting magnesium and calcium. And of course people also consume the one material that no known life can live without (water). (Are fasting people aquavarians?)

Geologists eat rocks all the time. No biggie. It's a much quicker test that pulling out all those silly scratch plates and mineral guides and magnifying glasses. At least, that's what my instructors always said before they got sick.

I said eating rocks, not tasting rocks. The geologists aren't seeking nutrition. I didn't know that people eat dolomite, and they don't carry it in my local supermarket. I do know that some people (particularly in the southern part of the US) eat dirt, although psychologists are still trying to figure out why.

Fasting is a bad idea. Remember J-J's First Rule of Dietary Appropriateness: "You should eat every day".