Gryphon Strength & Conditioning

Is Veganism An Inefficient Form of Genocide?

Sometimes I think that veganism is an poorly thought out feeling of guilt for existing.

The main impetus behind veganism is this vague notion that as humans we have a negative impact on other species in particular and the planet in general. This makes us immoral creatures, the theory goes, for choosing to exist in the same fashion that we have lived for the past several million years. Suddenly, in the last 0.0025% of our history, killing animals for meat and clothing has become immoral and wrong. Other animals should not die to support our existence, the vegans will say.

The main problem with veganism is that it is a moral decision that tries to use health as a justification. Vegans usually deflect justifying their lifestyle in direct terms, which is to say they falsely claim they are vegans for health reasons when the truth is their reasons are morally based. I say falsely because there is absolutely zero scientific evidence to suggest that a vegan diet is the optimal choice for health. All evidence is to the contrary, that numerous other diets offer significantly less compromises to one's health. Specifically, the lacto-ovo vegetarian diet and the so-called flexitarian diet (aka the occasional vegetarian) are demonstrably healthier by any standard. There are probably several other diets that are even healthier, but none more clearly superior (if marginally so) than those two.

So the fact is that veganism is an compromise, accepting an inferior diet so as to lessen one's impact upon other animals and the planet. It is cruel and immoral for other animals to be slaughtered to support our lifestyle, so the thinking goes. Nevermind that other animals kill to support their lifestyle. Nevermind that in the wild almost all sentient animals die horribly painful deaths by starvation, lingering disease, or being eaten alive by predators ripping at one's throat. Nevermind that death by old age is a rarity in the wild. Nevermind that farmed animals are almost always killed in a quick and painless manner unmatched in the wild. Apparently vegans don't watch Animal Planet. No, in the last few decades the idea of killing animals as a part of our lifestyle has become unacceptable to some misguided souls.

This compromise has a negative impact on health and welfare. Fur is murder they say? Fur is natural, sustainable, enviromentally friendly, and as it so happens nearly unmatched for warmth compared to using synthetic, environmentally unfriendly materials. To add to the hypocrisy, any so-called vegan who owns leather products is merely buying fur with the hair scraped off. What does leather and fur have to do with someone's health? Nothing. Vegan diets are healthy and natural? No, the evidence has to be twisted into a pretzel logic knot to come up with that conclusion. Most of the so-called evidence is taken from lacto-ovo diets and then perverted to fit the vegan way of thinking. Which is to say that lying about the evidence is okay if it saves a cow from being milked or a pig from being turned into delicious, succulent bacon. Mmmmmm, bacon.... If meat was so wrong to eat it wouldn't be quite so delicious. That's how nature works. 

The upshot is that if someone is sacrificing the quality of life for their own species in favor of another species, they're commiting a form of auto-genocide. Hey, if that's the way you feel then maybe it would be more efficient to put a bullet in your own brain. Or just stop having so many children. How about standing on the street corner and handing out condoms? Picket the local Catholic Church to protest their stance on birth control. Write letters to your conservative Republican congressman asking why he he'd rather export guns than birth control? But this passive-aggressive form of guilt and slow suicide must stop.

Some see a cute bunny. I see Rabbit Stew eating in the garden. Maybe we should just leave him alone and let the coyotes eat him. Or not.

You Are Not A Tuna

Quite often you'll hear the adage that a pound of bodyweight equals 3,500 kcalories of food. Well, this would be true if you were a bluefin tuna. New flash: you're not a fish. Your metabolism does not function like that of a fish.

Certain animals like the tuna grow until they die. Their muscles grow bigger, their bones grow bigger. Here we have a chart that shows the growth pattern of the southern bluefin tuna:

This looks nothing like the growth chart of humans. Note that the age of sexual maturity for the bluefin is about 4 years of age. Note that tuna start out life shorter and lighter than humans but they end up bigger and longer. In fact, in some parts of the world the largest bluefin tuna get up to 9 feet long and weigh near 1,000 pounds. They are eating and growing machines, converting sardines and anchovies  and squid into ever larger tuna. The only limiting factor seems to be the availability of food; if you feed a tuna more food, you basically get a nearly perfectly upscaled version of the same fish. Their allometry at any age is described by this very reliable formula, well known to avid fishermen:

Length x Girth² ÷ 800 = Weight

Obviously, formulas to predict weight based on girth and height simply don't work on people. Humans and most other mammals have quite a different metabolism. Humans stop getting taller soon after sexual maturity. Then they live another 50 or 60 years at the same height and -- until recently -- more or less the same weight. Look at other mammals in the wild -- they too stop getting bigger sometime shortly after sexually maturity.  It's not just height that stops; weight gain usually slows down dramatically or stops entirely. Mammalian metabolism has a built-in weight regulation system that is designed to keep adult weight within a certain narrow range. The mythical 3,500 calorie formula simply doesn't account for this. This is in stark contrast to animals like tunas and pythons and crocodiles, who grow until death.

It is only when you start feeding mammals a "modern" diet filled with sugar and processed food that
weight gain continues ad nauseum. Importantly, even this type of adult weight gain is entirely different in character to the tuna. If you feed a bluefin tuna more food, the result is more muscle and bone. If you feed a human a bunch of crappy modern food the weight gain will be mostly fat, some muscle, and almost no bone growth. It is only when the bodyweight regulation system is disrupted by crappy food that weight creeps up. Tuna have no such bodyweight regulation system -- for them more calories equals more fish. Tuna never stop being hungry. For you, more calories now should mean less hunger later. It would too, if you weren't eating such crap.

So throw out your food calorie counters. The human body doesn't work like that.

The Garbage In/Garbage Out Model of Weight Management

The current problem with managing bodyweight is that bad or irrelevant data keeps getting plugged into even worse theories. There's an old joke that says the Alabama legislature once tried to simplify the value of pi to "3" because the real value of pi was too hard to teach and understand. Much like high school math when it gets hard, many influential nutritionists have succumbed to simplifying nutrition into something easier to understand and to hell with getting the right results.

Study after study has shown that the Body Mass Index (BMI) is flawed, yet most of the powers-that-be keep using it. The exception is the military, who switched to tape measurements years ago when they found they were losing too many fit, muscular soldiers to the flawed BMI tables. Even non-medical personnel can be trained to use any of several tape measure methods in a matter of minutes. The BMI model is still used however because the data is even cheaper and more plentiful than tape measurements of wrist, waist, neck, forearm, etc.

The calorie counting method of data collection has been shown to be off by as much as 30%; in fact the FDA allows nutrition labels to be off by as much as 20% by law.  What's more, there's an erroneous yet prevalent school of thought that says weight can be managed by simply counting calories. The theory is that you'll lose a pound of bodyfat for every 3,500 calorie deficit. Using the 3,500 calorie model, that's a margin of error of 40-80 lbs. per year! The problem is that weight management is just not that simple; the body will attempt to auto regulate its bodyweight in a myriad of ways in response to changes in diet. The real key seems to be finding the food types that set the body's auto regulation system for weight management back on course.

So let's vow to quit using irrelevant data and bad theories just because they're cheap & easy.

Fitness Myths from the IFA "Fitness ABC's" [sic]

Recently I discovered the IFA (International Fitness Association) "Aerobics Instructor and Personal Trainer" certification. Their certification manual  is interesting in that it offers up most of the usual fitness industry garbage all in one spot. It's a classic example of what's wrong with the fitness industry. I like to say that if rocket science operated under the same standards as the fitness industry then NASA's highest achievement to date would be the fireworks they buy from the Chinese for the 4th of July. Here are some of the IFA gems, culled from their study materials. (Paraphrased with only the occasional hint of irony.)

You can tone a muscle. 
(Really? I can't find a description or definition of a toned muscle in any of my physiology books.)

Aerobic exercise will tone muscles.
(IBID. Also, aerobic exercise is notorious for destroying more muscle tissue than it has built.)

Exercise, particularly strength training, shortens muscles.
(Numerous studies have shown an increase in flexibility with decent strength training programs. Good lord, look at Olympic weightlifters. They're flexibility mutants.)

Aqua aerobics improves balance and posture.
(Balance is fairly task specific, as is posture. There's little to no balancing against gravity in water.)

Heart rate during exercise is determined by the choice of exercise.
(No, it's primarily determined by how hard the trainee works. Lance Armstrong burns a hell of a lot more calories per hour on his bicycle than Great Grandpa does.)

A 135 lb. individual playing soccer for one hour burns approximately 370 calories.
(IBID. Wow, sure that's not 380 or 360? This is incredibly over simplistic, even for an approximation. It shows no consideration at all for differences in effort level. The average pro soccer player runs anywhere from 5 to 10 kilometers in 60 minutes of game play. Fat amateurs are in no kind of shape to run those distances.)

Circuit training can't provide an effective aerobic workout.
(IBID. Lazy bastards. Try Crossfit's "Filthy Fifty" or "Diane" or "Helen" some time and get back to me.)

Strength training in the 6-8 rep range is considered the heavy range. 8-12 reps is for toning.
(No, a one-rep max is heavy. The tongue-in-cheek saying in powerlifting and Olympic lifting is that anything more than 5 reps is cardio. IBID on the whole toning bullshit.)

The abdomen has the largest muscle group. The waist is a separate muscle group from the abdomen.
(Wow. Someone needs to take an Anatomy 101 class or a proofreading class.)

The USDA's MyPyramid is the most up-todate and authoritative program for nutrition.
(Even the USDA gave up on MyPyramid. It was based on the Food Pyramid, which was one of the biggest failures in the history of nutrition ever. It was practically a recipe for contracting Type II diabetes. The USDA has since gone on to their latest debacle, the MyPlate program.)

Fat consumption is optimal at 10% of total calories.
(IBID. This advice is straight from the 1980's fad "Fat is Bad".)

Maximum heart rate can be accurately predicted using the formula [HRMax=220 minus Age].
(This formula from the 1930s has been shown to have "... no merit for  use in exercise physiology and related fields." Robergs and Landwehr, The Surprising History of the "HRMAx=220-Age" Equation, JEPOnline 2002;5(2)1-10.)

Trainees should try to maintain a Target Heart Rate, based on Maximum Heart Rate, during aerobic exercise.
(IBID)

As a rule, you are training too hard if you can't talk during exercise.
(IBID. If you want to finish at the back of the pack in a 5K road race, train this way.)

The Valsalva Maneuver is highly dangerous. Trainers should always alert clients when they are holding their breath during exercise, even for the shortest amount of time.
(If this were true, constipation alone would have wiped out more populations than the Bubonic Plague.)

A pound of bodyweight is equal to 3,500 calories.
(This assumes, among other things, that all weight loss and weight gain is purely in the form of bodyfat. Not only is this patently false but mathematically this equation wouldn't get past an 8th grade algebra class. This myth is a massively over-simplified description of an extremely complex regulatory system.)

Daily calorie expenditure can be calculated with a simple formula using just weight, activity level (High, Medium, or Low) and a couple of constants.
(Accurately? With just two variables and two constants? Not a chance. How about "wildly inaccurately"?) 

Surprisingly some organizations recognize and ask for the IFA certification by name, even with all the myths and typos in their literature.

 

 

O-lifting cert at Crossfit Belltown

This event sold out even before any of the Belltown regulars could sign up! It was a great crew of folks to coach.