Step to It

Like many other coaches, trainers, and health gurus, I’ve long recommended people consider tracking their daily step counts, aiming for at least 10,000 a day. And, indeed, research well supports the benefits of getting 10,000 daily steps; hitting that number results in a nearly 50% drop in all-causes mortality as compared to a sedentary baseline.

Still, the precision of 10,000 is a bit arbitrary. It stems from a Japanese 1960’s public service advertising campaign promoting the first cheaply available electronic pedometers, when “manpo-kei,” or “measure 10,000 steps,” made for an easy, succinct, and catchy slogan. Ever since, 10,000 has stuck as the default pedometer goal.

Earlier this month, however, the International Journal of Obesity published a great observational study of Scottish postal workers, examining the relationship between walking and metabolic syndrome (a cluster of health conditions that increase the risk of heart disease, stroke, and diabetes). Not surprisingly, the study concluded that “compared with those without metabolic syndrome, participants with metabolic syndrome were significantly less active-fewer steps, shorter stepping duration and longer time sitting.”

But tucked in the paper is a more interesting, and more specific, observation: all of the postmen and women who had no symptoms of metabolic syndrome walked at least 15,000 steps per day.

Obviously, there’s only so much we can glean from a single study. But it does suggest that, while 10,000 may be a great initial goal, it might not be the ideal final stopping point. So if you’re tracking your steps, and already consistently hitting 10k, consider upping that goal by 1,000 more each month, until you reach the 15,000 step point. Considering the huge amount of research backing the benefits of walking in general, wedging in a little more of it certainly couldn’t hurt.

Le Déluge

Back when I was in college, and running my first company, I regularly took the Metro North from New Haven to New York City several times a week. Each time I did, I’d stroll through the Posman Books location inside Grand Central, perusing the new fiction and non-fiction laid out on the tables by the front. I kept a list of books I wanted to read. And, dismayingly, despite being a life-long voracious reader, that to-read list always seemed to expand exponentially faster than the list of books I’d actually managed to finish. I remember being a bit depressed about it at the time, knowing I’d simply never be able to read everything I wanted to.

These days, I only rarely make it to a bookstore. Yet, every day, I watch enticing information and ideas stream across my path in an ever-growing number of mediums. On top of books and audiobooks, articles ‘saved to read later’ pile up in Pocket, episodes of podcasts accumulate in Overcast, blog entries stack in Feedly, and Tweets from smart and insightful people rush through my feed all day long.

In a way, that increased information overload has actually been comforting. With just a book-reading backlog to contend with, I could sometimes convince myself that I might, with herculean effort, find a way to ‘catch up.’ But now, with what I’d like to consume so vastly outpacing any conceivable human bandwidth, I’ve been forced to become a bit more zen. I learn what I can, and let the rest go.

Even so, I can’t help but sometimes wish I could freeze time, to finally make my way through all that delightful, fascinating content. As Tolkien observed, “I wish life was not so short. Languages take such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about.”

March 30, 2017

In the Weeds

[Is gluten intolerance really about pesticides?]

As I’ve said before, I’m not a nutrition dogmatist. While I think an ancestral-based approach is a good starting point for most people, I also strongly believe that differences in genetics, epigenetics, and microbiome cause different people to react very differently to the same foods. So it seems a prudent approach to start by paring down to a healthful dietary core, then test the re-addition of new foods to gauge their individualized effects.

Though wheat isn’t a central part of my own diet, I find that I can easily enjoy a bowl of pasta, say, without issue. But for a number of friends and Composite clients, removing grains has had hugely beneficial health impact.

More than a few of those ‘grain-reactive’ folks, however, have shared with me similar stories: though they feel terrible after eating even organic breads here in the US, while traveling in Italy or France, they decided that the chance to enjoy the local cuisine trumped their usual dietary concerns. But even after eating relatively large amounts of a food that they couldn’t tolerate at home, often for days at a time, they had no problems while abroad.

I’m dubious of claims (at least, health-based ones) against GMO’s, so I’d previously written off those international bread stories as the vagaries of travel – the excitement of being somewhere new, or the masking effects of a circadian rhythm tossed out of whack.

But today, I ended up diving down a rabbit-hole of research papers about glyphosate, an herbicide used as a primary ingredient in Monsanto’s hugely popular pesticide Roundup. Roundup is nearly ubiquitous in the US, where it’s used on 98% of non-organic wheat. And it travels well enough when airborne that it’s found on more than 50% of US organic wheat, too.

Though Roundup was approved as safe for humans back in the 1970’s, deeper research over the last decade has increasingly indicated that glyphosate – especially when combined with other ‘inert’ ingredients in Roundup – may be an extremely potent mitochondrial disruptor, which in turn can cause a broad array of health issues.

In other words, while people are complex, foods are, too. And, indeed, over the next few years, I suspect we’re going to discover that the rise of ‘gluten intolerance’ has less to do with an increase in people reacting negatively to wheat, and more to do with people reacting to the specific ways in which wheat is increasingly raised here in the US.

Our approach to large-scale agribusiness has certainly changed the fundamental economics of how we feed the world. But boy does it seem to come with a lot of second-order costs.

March 27, 2017

Key to Happiness

As the old adage goes, you only value your health once it’s gone.

That appears to apply to the health of your digital devices, too; I never realized how much I enjoy the left-side shift, control, and command keys on my MacBook until they suddenly gave out earlier today.

Since then, I’ve discovered that I use command- and control-dependent keyboard shortcuts pretty much nonstop, and I capitalize each ‘I,’ and the start of every sentence, using the left shift key by habitual default.

Having popped out and cleaned all three keys to no avail, I’m planning to simply leave the laptop at rest overnight, in the unrealistic hope that the wonky keys somehow miraculously fix themselves. And, barring that, I’ve blocked out all tomorrow morning to camp out at the Apple store, to see if their team of Geniuses can get things fixed relatively quickly in-house.

In the meantime, I’m at least getting to put my iPhone thumb-keyboarding skills to the serious test. As they say, fml.