Keep Cancer in Check

Cancer is the second leading cause of death in the UK, accounting for almost 30% of all cases of Mortality. Even though this statistic is grim, it gets grimmer, according to some authorities the incidence of Cancer in the UK is set to rise by 30% by the year 2030. This simply means that 1 in 3 of us will develop Cancer at some point in our life. With those odds I would take a serious look at how to avoid developing Cancer, as chances are if you don’t, you’re almost guaranteed to be holding a losing bet.

Despite all of the ostentatious headlines claiming new ‘cures’ for Cancer a lot of it is smoke and mirrors. ‘Cure’ when used in the Cancer arena, doesn’t have quite the same definition as we usually attach to the word. Being ‘cured’ of Cancer depends on a very short timeline of 5 years in most statistics. Usually in medicine, a disease is considered cured when it’s been successfully treated and does not return. The concept of ‘cure’ is difficult to apply to cancer because undetected cancer cells can sometimes remain in the body after treatment, causing the cancer to return later (known as a relapse). Many cancers are considered ‘cured’ when there is no cancer detected five years after diagnosis. However, recurrence after five years is still possible.

So you have to be careful when reading about advances in treatments as they are often using this ‘5 year survival rate’ definition to present their results. In most cases it’s not the fact that the Cancer was treated any better, it’s actually down to earlier diagnosis. New methods of diagnosis are allowing doctors to discover Cancer earlier which skews the data in this context to show improved survival rates. This doesn’t mean treatment is becoming much more effective than the previous renditions of ‘Cut, Burn and Poison’.

These treatments obviously serve a purpose once Cancer has developed and become established in the body. Although not pleasant, they do provide the body, temporarily, a fighting chance to fend off the disease. However, if the treatment is successful you are still left in the same position, albeit on slightly shakier footing, as you were before you developed the Cancer. That is you need to prevent relapse or initiation of the disease.

Prevention is the only way we’ll ever have a chance of fighting Cancer. But in order to do so you need to know the causes of Cancer. To do this you need to separate two very important variables; those being Genetic and Environmental, which can be thought of as Nature vs. Nurture. According to current statistics, overall the genetic influence on Cancer is approximately 10-20%, with environmental factors weighing in between 80-90%. Easy to see which area we should direct our attention. You also have to remember that the environmental factors also influence the genetic component, so in reality the weighting should be even higher due to this interaction. If you want to stay Cancer free, you need to look at what you do with your body (lifestyle) and where you do it (Environment).

Let’s have a look at the current recognised risk factors that influence Cancer development.

-Smoking                                                                     33%

-Overweight/ Obesity (and Sedentary Lifestyle)            25%

-Nutrient Deficiencies/ Diet                                           16%

-Viruses/ Infections                                                       7%

-Pollution (Food, Air, Water)                                        5%

-Excessive Sunlight Exposure                                        2%

-Drugs (Prescription)                                                    2%

-Drugs (Illicit) and Excess Alcohol                                1%

-Radon Gas                                                                  1%

-Radiation                                                                    1%

-Genetic Defects                                                           2%

-Unknown                                                                    5%

There you have it, you now know the odds. Most of us are pretty astute when it comes to betting, so it’s fairly obvious where you should place your stake. Smoking comes in first at 33% on its own. It will also contribute to other factors such as nutrient deficiency so the odds are actually higher. Overweight comes in next at a hefty 25%, another big player you’d want to eliminate to improve your odds. Combined with a poor diet, overweight and smoking account for almost 75% of all Cancer risks, it’s a no-brainer to avoid these sharks before turning your attention to the smaller fry.

The next biggest risk factor is from viruses and infections which cause 7% of all Cancers; this is how I developed Cancer. In actuality it’s probably because for years I was like a pot of milk constantly on the edge of boiling over. This chronic stress on my system lowered my immunity sufficiently to allow a virus to get a foothold, and that’s in an active non-smoker, with a very low level of bodyfat. This is one of the reasons I place such importance on lowering your stress levels, learn from my highly-strung mistake and don’t allow it to happen to you.

Even if you just avoid a few of the risks, if you choose the right ones, it actually impacts on the others. So by not smoking, remaining lean, eating a nutritious diet, learning to manage stress and avoiding pollution you can build up a protective defence against 85%+ of all Cancers.

Avoiding the big guns is the simplest and most effective strategy I can give you in avoiding this unpleasant disease. After you’ve eliminated the Cannons, all you have to repel are the pea-shooters.

Provocative Posture

Attaining a sculpted physique is not simply about losing fat, it’s definitely a huge component, but a properly designed program (not limited to fat loss) incorporates additional strategies to create what seem like unbelievable transformations, especially when compared relative to commercial programs.

One main variable that needs to addressed is posture.

Look at the wall photo that accompanies this article, they are all obviously the same person. However if you were to rank them in order of visual appearance in terms of who looks the most out of shape, I would assume that the ‘Kyphosis/ Lordosis’ versions would top the list. The next on the list would probably be forward head carriage. These 3 postural defects are actually the most common major distortions seen in the average person, and are usually evident as a combination of all three.

So by simply fixing postural imbalances we can ‘appear’ to be slimmer, without actually losing any fat. Appearance is a key word, as it’s the visual illusion that most people are most concerned by, embodied by the phrase ‘lookin’ good nekkid’. So a good fat loss program will not only focus on reduction of fat stores, but also how we present the body to best effect.

Every year people rush to the gym en-masse, either going it alone or hiring trainers to torture reluctant bodies back into youthful shape. To their amazement, this bully-begotten strength imposed on an impaired structure, only ails them more.

Unless you first analyse your structure, and design corrective measures as an integral part of every program, this new and hard fought for muscle will only increase defects and distortions, which will hasten, rather than reverse, degeneration.

Have a look around you, the evidence is obvious. The average person’s posture bears more of a resemblance to one of our Ape cousins than that of an upright Human. The skyrocketing incidences of postural defects in society arise from three main origins: domestication, cultural demands, and longevity.

We evolved in an extremely brutal environment, and our body still requires that level of exertion to function correctly. However, our current culture has developed an environment where it has almost eliminated any need for us to physically exert ourselves. This disconnect between our sedentary lifestyle and biological need for strenuous activity is a major cause for the degeneration of muscle, connective tissue and our skeleton.

Related to this cultural domestication is the demand’s it places upon us. Almost as soon as we are able to take our first wobbly steps as toddlers, those freed up hands are then put straight to work learning how to create scribbles on a parchment. This continues throughout our childhood, requiring young humans to be hunched over desks for a large proportion of their lives learning how to create and manipulate these squiggles to demonstrate their acquisition of intelligence. This carries forward into and throughout adulthood where we spend the majority of our days in the same position, putting to use these skills to demonstrate and apply our intelligence in an activity we call work.

Even outside of school and work, our leisure time is increasingly spent in this crouched seated posture as we in the UK currently spend on average 4 hours per day watching television. This figure doesn’t include the time spent using computers/ games consoles. All told the daily total that we spend in a huddled stoop is probably in the region of 14 hours, plus or minus a few hours. This habitual seated crouch shortens the hip flexors and hamstrings and overstretches the back muscles and connective tissue, all of which distorts the human spine.

One last bit of insult onto our structure is our increased longevity. In 1901 the expected lifespan of males was 45 years, and 49 for females, today we a soldiering on to 78 and 82 respectively. That increased span provides gravity a lot more time before our eventual demise to pull down the structure.

I can’t detail a full postural analysis here, as to be honest you could write a book on each joint (which there are), let alone the entire human body. However you can get a quick gross assessment of your posture by taking a side-on picture (like the attached photos). If you drop a vertical plumb line (you can do this easily on your photo-editing software) through the body, it should fall through the ear lobe, the midline of the shoulder, the midline of your Lumbar vertebrae (L3-5), just behind the hip, just in front of the knee and finally through the front of the ankle and the centre of the arch of your foot.

If you are excessively outside of these reference ranges (on average more than 1-2 inches), you may want to consider taking remedial action to correct the situation, as you’ll look and feel so much better having done so. With your head, trunk and pelvis in balanced vertical alignment, the body requires the least muscular activity, therefore the least energy, to hold itself upright, so by the end of the day you won’t feel knackered just simply from the fact of trying to maintain balance. Like a stack of dominos, if one is out of place you need put others out of place to compensate.

Posture, however, isn’t just limited to a visual arena, it can have very real and potent effects upon your biochemistry that can most definitely help fat loss (and other areas) via it’s influence on your hormones, neurology and psychology, although space limits us getting into that here, if there is call, I’ll write a further piece on that aspect.

Covetous Communique aka Hungry Hormones

Overweight and obesity is the single biggest threat to your health. This is not because it tops the list of risk factors for disease (although it is generally within touching distance of number one spot in most cases), but because it’s still seen as a bit of a joke. With children it’s often dismissed as ‘puppy fat’. In adults, well, it gets a bit more complicated especially with the advent of fat acceptance movements, an area I wish not to get involved in, far too much ego-driven posturing from both sides of the divide. In general most people try to avoid other obvious causes of disease such as smoking or because retro is cool; building our homes entirely out of asbestos, but body parts covered in excess fat, such as the colloquial ‘bingo wings’ are seen as some oddly tenuous objects of jest.

Partly due to this mental disconnect over 60% of the adult population in the UK has allowed themselves to become overweight or obese. Our kids aren’t faring too well either, almost a third of them are also in this condition.

People are still under the illusion that excess bodyfat is merely a cosmetic issue. I personally couldn’t care less about the aesthetic basis for arguments, after all ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’. Although there are evolutionary drives that influence attraction, it is heavily biased by subjective idiosyncrasies. So stepping aside the shallow ‘tis and ‘tisn’t arguments of superficially conceited individuals whom can’t get past their own hubris, let’s subjugate our ego’s and delve a little bit deeper.

Although the idea was first batted about in the 1950’s, it has only been in the last 20 years that researchers have discovered concrete evidence that the adipose tissue (fat cells) that makes up your bodyfat is not merely a storage warehouse of potential energy. It is actually part of a neuro-endocrine system that secretes a number of hormones that intimately control the functioning of your body. Once released these hormones proceed to affect every other organ and system in your body. We now know that when bodyfat gets above about 18% in men and 22% in women the leverage of this system begins to dominate, and the distorted chemical message starts to cause the whole body to degenerate.

Think about what happens when, for instance, another endocrine gland such as the Thyroid becomes over- or underactive, and sends out too strong of a message or doesn’t send out enough, both situations if left untreated, result in life threatening complications, yet we don’t treat bodyfat with the same reverence. In addition to under appreciating the severity of the problem to my knowledge there also isn’t a movement seeking personal, social and medical acceptance of people with goitres, although I have the perfect mantra for them to use ‘Wear your Goitre like an Accoutre’.

The hormones that Adipocytes (individual fat cells) secrete are called Adipokines, around which an emerging field of science is starting to build up a huge and rapidly expanding head of steam, especially since the mapping of the human genome in 2003. You may have even heard of one of these adipokines called Leptin which was discovered in 1994, we’re only just starting to get a handle on its workings.

Although the science on the Adipokines is fairly recent, we still have a fairly good idea how to modulate some of them for better or worse. However, I won’t be able to give you a good enough account of the science and keep the length of the article bearable, so I’ll truncate that side of things here and do a separate piece on each of the main players at a later stage.

What I would suggest is to get your bodyfat percentage measured (not your Body Mass

Index), if it’s above the aforementioned figures provided you may, it’s entirely up to you, want to consider taking steps to reduce your bodyfat towards these levels, as it’s one of the main variables you have within your control that will influence your health.

At the end of the day it’s your body, you can do what you like with it. If you are comfortable with yourself and are happy to accept the consequences, that’s all good too. After all, there’s always a silver lining, as I was once told it’s just ‘more cushion for the pushing’.

Lord of the Genes

One Gene to rule them all,
One Gene to find them,
One Gene to bring them all
and in the darkness bind them.

~ J.R.R. Tolkien….(sort of…)

In the linked article (http://tinyurl.com/6nzpvdw) you’ll be able to read a quick summary of a set of papers I came across a few months back during my daily perusal of the scientific journals (I know, I know, contain your jealousy, I’m aware of how exciting my life is…).

The studies are based on an off-shoot of a biochemical pathway (which seems to be one of the metabolic master controllers in the body) that I’ve been following the science of for nearly a decade now, when it was first discovered. With that in mind, when new understanding of any related pathway or points of stimulus or inhibition come out, there’s huge potential for this piece of the puzzle to be a key modulator of metabolism. This new finding might just be that key.

Quick summary, of the summary.  In studies on Nuclear receptor Co-Repressors (NCoR) knock out mice (knock out means the mice were bred to lack or have an inactive variant of a gene), the scientists found two interesting developments, firstly the mice’s ability in endurance activities doubled (they could run/ swim twice as far before exhaustion), and secondly they were more resistant to developing Insulin resistance and consequently Diabetes.

Depending on which tissue this knock out occurred you would get one or the other of the effects. If the gene was knocked out in adipose tissue (fat cells) then insulin resistance didn’t occur, even when they were induced to become obese (a known cause of Insulin resistance). If the knock out occurred in muscle tissue, then the endurance capacity effect was evident.

NCoR1 inhibits certain transcription factors, which are able to regulate gene expression, in muscle cells. A turning down of NCoR1 leads to an increase of these transcription factors, which in turn can activate genes that cause muscle mass to increase. In addition, the energy generating machinery of the cells, called mitochondria, were increased in number and activity.

In the fat cells however, knocking out NCoR1 resulted in an increase in insulin sensitivity, which is one of the key components that is broken in Diabetics and Pre-Diabetics. In addition, there was less tissue inflammation, another symptom which is prevalent in diabetes and most other disease states.

This is a really exciting development not only for health (not merely from a diabetic standpoint, it would also help the functional movement of specific populations such as the elderly amongst other positive health effects), but it could also hugely improve performance in sports.

I’ve been performing some trials on myself with a particular chemical which has been shown to modulate certain overlapping pathways involved in this cascade. So far it seems to be working very well within the limitations of my particular remit. I’m finding the endurance elements of my training a lot more comfortable and my bodyfat percentage is decreasing without any other intervention. I’ll let you know more as the evidence comes in, and if I’m right about this particular substance, it’s going to be huge.

Interesting times.

Says it all

Flicking through my Twitter feed I came across this gem the other day (17^th Jan 2012)

‘Cutting 600 kcals from your RDA of 2,550 will lead to safe weight loss of up to 1kg per week, says the British Nutrition Foundation’.

Phew….breathe….

I have a few issues (if you stop the sentence here, it’s also true) with this.

First a bit of context. The Tweet was posted by Mens Health (UK), the largest health and fitness lifestyle magazine for men, both in print and online formats, so they have quite a lot of sway in the education and general mindset of the public. In addition it was based on information provided by the British Nutritional Foundation, who in their own words exist to ‘Provide(s) nutrition information for teachers, health professionals, scientists, and general public. Publications, conferences and educational resources.’ So again we have an organisation with huge influence on the nutritional knowledge of the public; which is why I have such a problem with this ‘information’. If it was merely mis/un-informed individuals repeating this nearly 100 years old (the original study all of this is based on was performed in 1917), out of date rubbish, it wouldn’t be so bad, but it’s not. The people involved are sources of supposed knowledge who inform the policy makers (in the case of the BNF) and essentially set public opinion (in the case of Mens Health (UK)).

Look at the message again. I wasn’t sure whether it was a typo and was supposed to have been 1lb instead of 1kg, as this is more in line with the common (but very wrong) recommendation of a 500Kcal per day deficit resulting in a 1lb weight loss per week (500Kcal x 7 = 3,500Kcal, the average amount of Calories liberated when a pound of fat is burned in a Bomb Calorimeter). In either case, it doesn’t matter it’s flat out in-accurate.

As I’ve shown before the Human body (or in fact any living organism on Earth) doesn’t burn/use/store (choose your own term, it’s irrelevant) Calories, so I’m not going to belabour the scientific process here. What I will show you is that even using their own erroneous equation doesn’t even work in practice.

This formula (3,500Kcal = lb Fat) is used by 99% of public and private health diet advisors, however the study I am citing was funded and based upon the protocols of Weight Watchers, easily the biggest ‘weight loss’ company in the world, so I feel quite comfortable using them as an example. It’s amazing how audaciously the results were presented, even though the study demonstrated that the formula and systems based upon it are out and out failures, the marketing machine managed to do quite a job on what should have been a catastrophic hit.

On average, Weight Watchers sets out to create a deficit of around about 1,000 Calories a day (based on the theory that, for example, a typical female requires 2,000 Calories per day, so is given an allowance of 18-20 points. One point is roughly 50 Calories, so this is an approximate 900-1,000 Calories a day diet). Using the previously mentioned equation, a 1,000 Calorie per day deficit, over one year, should be sufficient to lose 104 pounds in fat alone (not including other tissue loses that accompany fat loss). Now we have that in mind, let’s take a look at the study.

The study used 772 overweight and obese adults who were recruited by primary care practices in Australia, Germany, and the UK. Participants were randomly assigned to receive either 12 months of standard care provided by their GP (essentially basic advice), or 12 months of free membership to a commercial program (Weight Watchers), and followed up for 12 months. The primary outcome was to determine weight change over 12 months. (1)

The results showed that out of the 377 participants who were assigned to the commercial programme, 61% (230) completed the 12-month assessment; and of the 395 who were assigned to standard care, 214 (54%) completed the 12-month assessment. In all analyses, participants in the commercial program group (WW) lost twice as much weight as did those in the standard care group. Mean weight change at 12 months was -5·06 kg (SE 0·31) for those in the commercial program versus -2·25 kg (0·21) for those receiving standard care in those who completed the 12-month assessment.
Mark one up for Weight Watchers. Twice as effective huh! Ummm…not so fast….

Look at the results again. This means that the Weight Watchers group lost an average of 11 pounds in one year – less than one pound a month. Hold on, surely there must be some mistake here. The participants were observed to have created a 1000 Kcal per day deficit, according to common knowledge all WW group participants should have lost somewhere close to 104 lbs…granted those initially weighing less than 7 stone to begin with may have run into a bit of trouble and ceased to have existed, but damn it, it’s an equation, we shouldn’t let reality skew our beliefs.

Yet, despite this, the result was chalked up and announced in the media as a huge success for Weight Watchers with a headline of ‘Weight Watchers Works’, and people lapped it up; after all their program achieved twice the results of a GP’s recommendation of ‘take the dog for a walk, and eat a bit less’. Even though the program delivered only 10% of the promised results, this was not seemingly important (although it was the basis for the study) and was not so stealthily brushed under the carpet, rather it was just merely ignored.

So there you are, you have an organisation who informs the government, teachers, the NHS and most other national bodies, who doesn’t understand the very basics of  their ‘own’ subject, alongside the most popular men’s fitness and health media source relaying their unsubstantiated and defective information and also the vast machine that is Weight Watchers, who’s whole empire is based upon a fallacy which even when they ensure that the chance of failure is minimal can’t even achieve 90% of their promised result.

As I often say, take great care with whom you give your mind, it and the body it influences is the most valuable thing you will ever possess; treat it with reverence you deserve.

Reference:

1. Jebb SA et al. Primary care referral to a commercial provider for weight loss treatment versus standard care: a randomised controlled trial. Lancet. 2011 Oct 22;378(9801):1485-92. Epub 2011 Sep 7.