This chemical, banned in France, Canada and China, is used in plastic and aluminum containers with surprising regularity in the United States.  Part of the reasons there’s so much noise about the chemical these days is that the FDA refuses to ban it here.

Is “BPA-Free” good enough?

But some changes are on the way.  The FDA did, last year, finally ban BPA in certain baby products, including baby bottles).  And “BPA Free” stickers are popping up all over the place on water bottles and food packaging, two of the major sources of the chemical in our diets.

This is for the better.  BPA is called an “endocrine disruptor” because it mimics the presence of estrogen in our bodies.  The effects of this are uncertain, but it’s suspected to contribute to afflictions ranging from diabetes to heart disease, to breast and prostate cancer, to thyroid problems, obesity and infertility.  Perhaps most importantly, it’s believed to lead to sexual and brain development problems in children.  Children (particularly girls) exposed to BPA during pregnancy have a higher risk of depressed and hyperactive behavior.  Some think BPA is also linked to an observed decline in average age at which American girls now hit puberty.

Scary stuff.

And what’s worse, we’re starting to learn that even “BPA Free” products may not much safer.  Remove the BPA, and you typically replace it with another chemical that serves a similar function.  The most popular of these is – and no, I’m not making this up – bisphenol S, or BPS.

And BPS, unsurprisingly enough, may be just as bad as BPA.  In tests on rats, it interferes in much the same way as BPA with how our bodies respond to natural estrogen.

So, what to do?  The best way to avoid BPA, or other nasty chemicals that create the same problems for our bodies, is to avoid plastics and tins wherever possible, and regardless of whether they’re labeled “BPA free.”  This is not the easiest thing to do, particularly since when we dine out it’s difficult to know how the food we eat (including the ingredients used to make it) has been packaged.

But there are a couple simple steps you can take to get yourself started on the right track.  One is something you should be doing anyway: eating fresh fruits and vegetables.  They typically have no packaging, and so no opportunity for chemicals like BPA and BPA to leach into them.  Second, if you must use plastic packaging, avoid plastic #7 and favor plastics #1, 2 and 4.  Third, when you heat or reheat food, use glass, ceramic or (if not in a microwave) stainless steel containers.  BPA is more likely to leach when heated.  And finally, when drinking water, look to glass or stainless steel, rather than plastic, cups or water bottles.

Read enough about food, and the way it’s grown, processed and distributed today, and you’re bound to find some ugly facts about foods you’ve eaten for years.

The patty isn’t the worst thing for you in this picture. But it isn’t the best.

And many of these ugly facts will be about meat.  There are enough groups opposed to meat eating – ethical vegans, organizations protesting cruelty to animals, doctors who feel that meat is the origin of heart disease and cancer – that ugly facts about meat production and consumption tend to get out in front of the public eye very quickly.

And many of these facts are truly ugly.  But others aren’t as ugly as they may seem.  How to sift trough everything you hear and separate fact from fiction?  Here’s my best shot at it.

Health.  Meat gets a bad rap these days.  It’s linked in studies, or at least in popular culture, to heart disease, cancers, obesity, diabetes.  But do these links really exist?

To some degree, yes.  Meat eating does seem to correlate with a higher incidence of heart attacks and strokes.  It does seem to increase your odds of suffering various forms of cancer.  And it may even have some link to weight gain.

But I’m not sure animal products themselves are to blame.  Meat itself shouldn’t cause heart disease: the Masai in east Africa live off nothing but cow’s milk and cow’s blood and yet have a far lower (if any) incidence of heart disease than Americans.  It doesn’t seem to cause most cancers.  Sure, prostate and colon cancer seem correlated to meat consumption; but for most cancer there’s no difference in risk between vegans and meat lovers.  And meat shouldn’t make you obese.  The Masai typically aren’t obese (far from it), despite their diets.  And in my own experience, eating cooked meat doesn’t make me any heavier than eating cooked vegetables.

So, why does meat get such a bad rap?  Well, there are a couple problems.  One is, despite the Masai’s good track record of eating meat but avoiding heart disease, there does seem to be a correlation between the two in America.  Very possibly, this is due to the way we raise our meat.  Masai cattle graze on grass, as cows are “designed” to do.  Here, we force them to live off corn, soybeans and rendered animal products, none of which the cow’s body is designed to digest.  For whatever reason, this results in beef, milk and cheese that’s lower in omega-3 fatty acids and higher than omega-6 fatty acids than their counterparts from grass-fed cattle.  This fatty acid imbalance is notorious for creating inflammation, and inflammation is a major factor in heart disease.

Inflammation is also a major factor in cancer, and there’s some sign that with certain cancers meat consumption – even as little as one serving per week – can dramatically increase risk.  Inflammation may, after all, create a hospitable environment for cancer as well.

As for weight gain, I’m skeptical there’s a direct connection.  However, there may be an incidental one.  One food I’m confident will cause weight gain is white bread, and due to the prevalence of hamburgers, hot dogs and deli sandwiches in our society, meat often goes hand in hand with white bread.  So, if you eat the two together, then yes, meat (plus white bread) will often cause weight gain.

So I’m not sure that meat is unambiguously unhealthy.  Properly raised, I believe it can be perfectly healthy.  But if you’re eating meat that’s not properly raised, take care.  You may want to at the least offset it with some omega-3 supplements, or fatty fish; and you may well want to monitor your intake.

Ethics.  I’ve talked ad nauseum about the ethical concerns of eating animals, particularly since reading Jonathan Safran Foer’s book of the same name.  (Eating Animals.)  The book is reportedly now being made into a documentary.

I won’t rehash all these arguments here.  In short, I’m not thrilled about eating pigs or chickens (or their eggs) the way these animals are raised today.  (Cows seem to be treated better, though not in ways you’d want to be treated if you were cow.)  I’m generally not particularly squeamish about animal rights (though I can see us looking back some day with horror at our current meat eating society), but a lot of what’s done borders on the type of sick torture you’d see in a dark science fiction film.

Today’s society makes it hard to avoid animal products unless you hang out regularly with vegans, prepare the vast bulk of your meals at home, or are willing to eat foods like white bread, potato chips or French fries that are widely available at restaurants, diners and convenience stores but that wreak havoc on your body.  It’s also hard unless you want to always eat something different when you order takeout with friends, demand vegan fare when someone else cooks for you, and always pick the restaurant when you go out for dinner.

So for someone who doesn’t want to play a role in what’s done today to our food animals, but wants to live a somewhat normal food life, there’s little choice but compromise.

For me, the balance I’ve struck is to eat vegan when I’m alone, or when it’s otherwise not majorly disruptive of my life and that of those around me, or to my health, and to do as the Romans do the rest of the time.  I do care about stopping torture of food animals.  I also want to live my life, and society makes completely responsible choices extremely challenging in this area.

So, what I’ve learned this past year is, keep meat (particularly improperly raised meat – which is the vast majority of meat served or sold in this country these days) to a fairly small portion of your diet.  For your health, and for the animals.

Gluten Free.  I started experimenting with a gluten free diet last year somewhat by chance.  I’d recently gone vegan (which I’ve since revised to being vegan when I’m not dining with others), and in order to make up for the meats and cheeses that had previously played a large role in my diet, I turned hard core to gluten.

I recommend this cereal. But don’t make it the only thing you eat.

Not because I wanted gluten itself, but because the first vegan foods I could think of that could satisfy my runner’s appetite without the use of animal products were loaded with the stuff: whole grain breakfast cereal and whole grain pasta.

Around this time, I’d noticed a profound fatigue early in the afternoon that I couldn’t shake.  Simultaneously, I came across an article about Novak Djokovic, who at the time was dominating tennis and crediting his gluten free diet.  I’d heard that gluten could make some people sluggish, and Djokovic claimed his diet gave him more mental energy.

And here I was, eating almost nothing but gluten.  I figured I’d give the diet a shot.

And, sure enough, it worked.  No more crushing fatigue in the early afternoon.

And so I’ve largely stuck with the diet.  But I have a couple caveats.

One is, since I started posting about going gluten free, people tend to think I’m a big proponent of the diet.  I’m not, necessarily, and I’m not even 100% gluten free myself.  Going gluten free seems to make a big difference for people who have celiac disease (which reflects an inability to process gluten properly).  And cutting back on gluten makes sense for the rare person, like me a year ago, who eats almost exclusively whole grain cereals and pastas.

But for the rest of us, I’m not sure that there’s any benefit to going 100% gluten free.  Small amounts of gluten don’t seem to bother me.  Eat some pasta, or some rye crackers, or even some bourbon, and I don’t see any recognizable side effects.  I feel more or less as I do any other day.

So I don’t know that, if you’re not currently suffering major, obvious problems due to gluten consumption, you’ll benefit in any way from completely eliminating it from your diet.

That said, there are a couple inadvertent benefits to going gluten free.  One is, if you’re gluten free, you’re not eating bread.  And if you regularly eat white bread, which along with sugar may be the worst thing you can put in your body, then going gluten free will inadvertently remove this white bread from your diet and make you a much healthier person.  You’ll probably also feel much better.

Secondly, grains are almost invariably cooked.  Yes, you can soak and sprout grains, and there are probably some grains you can otherwise simply eat raw, but this is not the way most grains enter our diets.  And, in general, the more raw foods you eat, the better your diet.  So cutting gluten also means cutting some foods that are almost invariably cooked.  And that’s another side benefit.

But otherwise, I’d allow gluten in my diet except to the extent I can feel evident side effects from it: nausea and upset stomach if you’re celiac, profound fatigue if you’re an over-consumer of gluten.

Diet.  Read the papers, and you can find an article on pretty much any food stating that it’s good for you, and another stating that it’s bad.  What to do?  Simple.  I’ve tested pretty much all foods on my body over these past few years, and I find there’s a hierarchy of what foods are better for you.  I’ve based these on foods’ results on my weight, my regularity, the feeling in my stomach following a meal, and even on, if you believe me, eyesight.  I’ve also taken into consideration, albeit to a lesser degree, undisputed scientific consensuses (though there are very few of these) on foods’ effects on cancer, heart disease and happiness (yes, those studies are out there).

Your mother was right: Eat your fruits and vegetables.

My conclusion is, the best foods you can eat are raw fruits and vegetables.  It doesn’t matter which ones.  Don’t worry about looking for particular vitamins or minerals, or “superfoods” or foods that promise to “improve digestion,” “foster heart health” or “support immunity.”  Just look for (1) a fruit or vegetable that’s (2) raw.

I think that if people recognized the true difference raw fruits and vegetables have on your body, they would be much less of a tough sell.

Second, behind raw fruits and vegetables, is lightly cooked fruits and vegetables.  No, they don’t have to be completely raw to get any benefit.  The more raw the better, but a little cooking is better than none.

Third, fully cooked fruits and vegetables, and meat that’s properly raised.  ”Properly raised” means that the animal ate what the animal would eat in nature.  A cow, for instance, would eat grass, and not corn.  A chicken would graze on bugs and grass and whatever else it can peck at, not just soybeans, corn and rendered animal products.  Very little of the meat in grocery stores or restaurants today meet these criteria.

Fourth is processed foods and improperly raised meat.  Processing itself is not necessarily harmful, in my opinion, though I recognize this opinion goes against current food trends.  It’s certain ingredients added in processing, and others removed, that make the food so bad.  I don’t mind blending fruits and vegetables together.  (That’s processing.)  I do mind removing all the fiber, vitamins and minerals and just leaving the sugar.  (Then you’re eating empty calories, depriving your body of what it needs, leaving it perpetually hungry and undernourished.)

I also mind adding ingredients that are demonstrably harmful to us.  Vegetable oils that were extracted with chemicals and then “refined” with high heat are not the best things for us to put in our bodies.  They tend to be heavily inflammatory, causing problems ranging from aches and pains to arthritis to a hospitable environment for cancer cells and heart disease.  See vegetable oils (other than extra virgin or expeller pressed oil) in the ingredients list?  Know what you’re doing to your body if you consume it.

Improperly raised meats are similar.  They tend to be highly inflammatory, and there are fewer conditions more dangerous in the long run for your body than hyper-inflammation.  This is why omega-3 supplements, which tend to reduce improper inflammation, have grown so popular.

Finally, added sugar and other refined carbohydrates round out the list.  I would avoid these at nearly all costs.  These should be foods should be consumed as rarely as possible and in as low doses as possible.  There is nothing worse you can put in your body than white bread, white pasta, (very likely) white rice or added sugar.  If the word “flour” is included in the ingredients list and isn’t followed by “whole” or “whole grain,” don’t eat it, or eat it very, very sparingly.  That goes even if one of the ingredients is whole grain flour but another ingredient is flour that isn’t whole grain.

To be continued in the following post . . . .

The latest, from the Wall Street Journal, has lodged itself in my head.  The article details a father’s experience with young children who come home excited after hearing about McDonald’s Happy Meals for the first time.  Combine food with toys, and you have a powerful way to lure children to your fast food restaurant.

Toys and cartoons. How can a plain old vegetable compete?

The article’s author and his wife had raised the kids away from fast food as a conscious choice about health and diet.  His wife’s initial reaction was to tell the kids McDonald’s is “poison” and that they should stay away at all costs.  His own reaction was only slightly less brash: bribing the kids to eat vegetables instead.

But psychiatrists, whom the author consulted while writing the article, advise against both approaches.  Singling out “forbidden foods” may only make the kids’ desire for those foods stronger – and their repulsion for the healthier alternatives foist upon them more powerful as well.  And bribery only reduces a child’s appetite for the foods they’re bribed to eat.

Go figure.

So, what to do?  There are a couple approaches even the psychiatrists agree with.  One is to educate your kids about marketing: cartoons may make foods appealing to them, but often it means merely that there’s more money in those foods for the companies that manufacture them, making it worthwhile for them to spend the money creating those cartoons and making them omnipresent.  It certainly doesn’t mean those foods are the ones they should be eating.  In fact, the cartoons kids love most often signal heavily processed, profitable and unhealthy foods.  The foods that are good for them rarely have mascots.

Of course, a marketing lesson may seem a weak motivator to deter kids from unhealthy foods.  Perhaps more influential would be a second line of attack psychiatrists advocate: repeatedly offering healthy options, with the understanding that kids may reject them the first several time they try them, then finally decide they like them.  Why this happens I don’t know, but apparently it happens.

So if you’re trying to keep your kids away from the vast array of disastrously unhealthy foods society repeatedly thrusts in our face, the best approach may not be to fight it directly.  Instead, try talking candidly to your kids about why McDonald’s meals include toys, and keep healthier foods in front of them at least as often as they’re exposed to those unhealthy foods.  After a while, they just may catch on.

And as a food writer and entrepreneur, they perk up doubly when this advice pertains to food.

Is it only baby formula that falls short? Or all our heavily processed foods?

So a new study quickly caught my attention: infant formula not only produces more free fatty acids–known to damage cell membranes–when digested, but those free fatty acids kill of the cells that line the intestines and blood vessels, along with white blood cells that control inflammation caused by cell trauma.  In the same study, breast milk wreaked far less havoc.

Lest you’re worried, the study wasn’t conducted on babies, but on cells in a laboratory.

What this study means in practice is uncertain.  For some time, doctors have extolled the benefits of breast milk and warned parents who are able to breastfeed that it’s better to stay away from formula.  Formula’s been tied to a number of developmental ills, most recently a correlation to adulthood obesity.  But it’s not entirely clear what this study adds to our bank of knowledge, except that breast milk seems to be far kinder to our bodies than formula.

Still, the study’s findings are disconcerting.  If what goes on in the lab goes on in our bodies, then formula does some damage inside a baby’s body, at a very vulnerable time in its physical development.

Yet the study really doesn’t speak only to baby formula.  The lesson here may be far broader, and applicable to all of us, at any age.  Our bodies are designed to handle natural foods, and not foods we cook up through heavy manufacturing.  While there’s wide scientific and, increasingly, societal, consensus that the lab-made formula we’ve tried to piece together to match a mother’s natural milk doesn’t match the original product nature has provided us, there’s less of a recognition that the same dynamic plays out in all of our food.

All these lab-designed foods that come out touting added nutrients and minerals, tons of x or y beneficial ingredient, sound great.  Sure, potassium is necessary for our bodies, and we should be getting some in our diet.  But does this mean we should buy a processed food that has added potassium?

Not necessarily.  Because we’ve played this game already, and lost.  We’ve done our best to fill up baby formula with all the components it needs – all the nutritional components found in mother’s milk.  And yet it just doesn’t work the same.  Because no matter what nutrients we’ve identified to date, we simply aren’t at a stage where we can completely duplicate natural materials, and create manufactured foods that offer the same nutritional balance that natural foods provide us.

Maybe some day we’ll know enough to make this work.  But if it doesn’t work today for baby formula, after decades of trying, what makes us think all those processed foods in the grocery aisle are working for us, regardless of their fabulous nutritional claims?

Let’s take a lesson from our babies and do what we ask of them–eat what nature already provides, and what our bodies are already supremely suited to thrive off.

Almost inevitably we talk about making sure we get “enough.”  Enough magnesium, enough calcium, enough omega-3, enough protein, enough fruits, enough vegetables.

Take fiber from oat and put in sugary beverage. Get health?

But I think we’re going about things horribly wrong.  Because after everything I’ve read, all the questions I’ve asked, all the studies, theories, articles and debates I’ve come across, it’s clear to me that getting proper nutrition isn’t a matter of being sure you get enough of all the nutrients we supposedly need to function.

It’s a matter of not eating foods that sabotage our nutrition.

What’s the difference?

Take one of our industry’s latest fads, functional beverages.  I’ll use a specific product, Sneaky Pete’s Oatstanding Beverage Mango Mystique, as an example.  But I’m not singling it out–pretty much all functional beverages, all functional foods, and basically all heavily processed foods of any sort, suffer the same problems I’ll describe here.

Sneaky’s Pete’s is called “functional” because it offers us fiber.  5 grams in a 12 ounce serving, to be precise.  They do this by culling fiber from oats, where it naturally resides, and transforming it, along with water and other ingredients, into a beverage.  Trying to get more fiber into your diet?  This is one way.  But there are several problems with drinking this beverage to up your fiber intake.

(1) Who says you need fiber?  I’ve found plenty of studies showing that fiber consumption is correlated to certain positive health outcomes.  But these studies almost invariably talk about fiber consumed as part of a fruit, vegetable or whole grain.  Sure, fruits, vegetables and whole grains have fiber.  But why do we think it’s the fiber in those fruits and vegetables that’s making us healthy?  It could be any number of other things.  An oat, or an apple, is hardly just a big ball of fiber.

What’s more, traditional indigenous tribes like the Inuit, which live or lived exclusively off fish and some land animals, or the Masai, who live or lived exclusively off of cow, cow’s blood, and cow’s milk, see many of the same positive health outcomes we see from our fiber-eating friends.  And they’re not getting very much fiber.

(2) If you need fiber, why are you getting it from a beverage?  And what makes you sure that fiber, when extracted from whatever matter it was naturally found in (A fruit?  A vegetable?  Where’d they get that fiber from anyway?) and left to float around in sugar water, will have the same positive impact on your body that it had (if it had one) when it was part of a whole food and consumed along with the other parts of the whole food with which humans have always consumed that fiber?  Why don’t you just eat a fruit or a vegetable if you’re so sure you need fiber?

What’s more, by drinking this beverage, you’re also drinking “evaporated cane syrup,” which is also known as sugar.  Added sugar.  Which pretty much everyone today agrees is horrible for us.

So, is this beverage healthy?

It depends on how we look at nutrition.  If you look at nutrition as needing to get certain nutrients, then, hey, this drink gets you fiber.  Great.  Let’s drink it.

But if you look at proper nutrition as avoiding foods that sabotage our nutrition, then get this out of your pantry.  Everything you eat either is wholly and perfectly nutritious–like an apple, or an orange, or lettuce, or raw milk–or imperfectly nutritious, like any beverage that includes added sugar (whether or not that sugar is called “evaporated cane juice”), white flour, white rice, chemicals, heavily heated or heavily processed ingredients (like sunflower oil and soybean oil, which can only be extracted with high heat and chemicals that warp the nutritional content of your food).

Every little bit of “imperfect” ingredient that you eat is starving your body of its necessary nutrition.

So, don’t look at the 5 grams of fiber as a “plus” in your body’s nutritional bank account.  Look at the added sugar as a “minus.”  If you’re eating a whole food like an apple or a pear or a watermelon, there’s no “minus.”  You’re fine.  That food will not give you diabetes, will not cause your hair to fall out, will not age you prematurely, will not make you gain weight, will not contribute to Alzheimer’s (unless perhaps if it’s sprayed with chemicals), will not contribute to cancer (with the same caveat).

But if you’re eating something with added sugar, with white flour, with added oils that were extracted with high heat and chemicals, there’s a minus.  There’s some lost nutrition you’re not going to get back.  It’s something your body didn’t evolve to learn how to process, and isn’t going to figure out how to process during your lifetime.

The added fiber may be OK, but you can and should get that fiber from other places.  In any event, if you don’t put “minuses” into your body, you shouldn’t have to worry about getting enough pluses.  Whole, natural foods should give you everything you need.  I have yet to find any instance of anyone eating exclusively whole, natural foods in any remote sort of variety and having vitamin deficiencies.  ”Primitive” tribes that eat whole, natural foods rank far higher than we do in all sorts of health exams, outside of ailments like external trauma and infectious diseases that their primitive lifestyles and forms of medicine, rather than their diets, expose them to more than do our own.

So, will Sneaky Pete’s kill you?  Not today, that’s for sure.  There are worse foods out there.  (And again, I’m not singling out Sneaky Pete’s; all other sugared beverages are at least as bad.)  I’d probably rather have sugar plus fiber than sugar alone.  But the sugar’s a problem.  If you drink sugary beverages, and want to swap out your Pepsi for some Sneaky Pete’s, be my guest.  But remember that you’re still drinking a sugary beverage.  That’s a snack, a dessert, a dietary lapse, a health negative.  Don’t kid yourself that this beverage is making you healthier.  It’s a momentary pleasure somewhat less harmful than Pepsi, but it’s not a substitute for real food, for a real meal or even a real snack.

Anecdotally, it seems every other mother I know has a child with severe food allergies, allergies neither I nor any of my classmates suffered during own childhoods.  And statistically, food allergies in general rose in the U.S. by 20% in just a decade leading up to 2007.

I guess we shouldn’t be surprised if pesticides in our drinking water cause health problems.

Why the rise?  A recent study from the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology suggests it may be due to pesticides present in our tap water.

We all know pesticide residues stay on our food.  But they also get into our body by leaching from the soil into our drinking water.  And, in this recent study, places with higher levels of pesticides in their drinking water also saw a higher incidence of food allergies.

That doesn’t necessarily prove that these pesticides are causing the food allergies, but it does raise the possibility.  According to the researchers, the pesticides in question, called dichlorophenols, are known to kill bacteria.  It’s possible that these pesticides kill bacteria in children’s digestive tracts, making the digestive process more prone to failure in response to certain foodstuffs.

However it may work, if the relationship between these pesticides and the recent increase in food allergies holds, then we’ve taken a major step toward reversing the trend.  More research is necessary.  But studies like this one that show a possible causal link behind an erstwhile mystery ailment can help to trigger additional studies.  And hopefully an answer sooner rather than later.

Can exercise help you lose or maintain weight?

My new training regimen. Less running and more strength training means sloppier research on my part.

This may sound like an odd question, since for decades we’ve assumed the answer is “yes.”  But there’s been a flood of doubt lately that exercise has an impact on weight control, and some of the arguments against it are compelling, though they often contradict each other.

One argument I’ve found at times very convincing is Gary Taubes’.  Author of Good Calories, Bad Calories and Why We Get Fat, Taubes has spent years digging through medical research on what he calls the “diseases of civilization”: ailments like diabetes, heart disease, obesity, certain cancers, arthritis and Alzheimer’s that by many measures have boomed in recent decades alongside national – and increasingly global – dietary and lifestyle changes.

Taubes is skeptical that exercise plays much of a role in weight control.  He does seem to acknowledge that exercising large amounts – maybe an hour to an hour and a half of running every day – can have an impact here.  But he doubts that any less makes much difference.  And for most of us, an hour or more of running every day is out of the question.

His theory makes some intuitive sense: If you burn more calories during a given day, you only make yourself hungrier, and so you end up eating enough additional calories to counteract the ones you’ve burned.  You’re not going to lose or maintain weight this way.  Instead, you have to change what you eat, by eliminating foods (primarily refined carbohydrates including sugar and white flour) that tend to cause weight gain, if you want to control your weight.

But is he right?  It’s always tough to be sure.  If there’s one thing my most recent marathon has taught me, it’s that running an hour to an hour and a half a day (which I did 6 days a week for several months while training) will certainly make you lose weight.

For whatever reason, your body doesn’t ask you to eat back all the extra calories you burn while exercising in that quantity.  Maybe there just isn’t enough time in the day to eat that much; maybe your body learns it will have to carry itself over the pavement for 60 to 90 minutes each day and wants to be lean as possible; or maybe exercise simply does shift the caloric balance by burning more than it leads you to consume.  In any event, it works; I lost a solid ten pounds during marathon training while eating, if anything, a lower quality diet that would normally cause me to gain, not lose, weight.

But at that high level of exercise, even Taubes acknowledges that exercise will cause you to lose weight.  It’s at lower levels that he’s skeptical.  And so it’s in this current post-marathon period where we’ll find out whether he’s right (at least when it comes to my own body).

So far, I’m up about 4 pounds in two weeks post-marathon, eating about the same types of foods I ate during training but with less than half the weekly training mileage.  (I’ve cut back so far from 50-65 miles per week, to 15-20.)

What does this mean?  It’s probably too soon to tell.  More telling will be whether I go back to my old weight from before marathon training, when I wasn’t exercising at all.  That would indeed suggest that lower, albeit positive, levels of exercise are completely ineffective in controlling weight.

But this will take some time to determine.  True gain or loss of just one pound apparently requires the burning of 3500 more calories than one consumes (or vice versa), and those sorts of numbers take time to accumulate.  (It’s remarkable if I’ve been able to consume 14,000 more calories than I’ve burned in just two weeks.)  So it may take my body weight some time to settle into its new, lower-exercise baseline weight post-marathon training.

Plus these studies always have their complications.  It was easy for me to gauge changes in my weight from starting marathon training because I’d been almost completely sedentary throughout last winter, before starting training in late spring.  All that had changed was the running.  This time, though I’m cutting back on running mileage, that won’t the the only change.  I’m also adding in some strength training (core exercises, pushups, squats and similar low-weight, high-rep upper and lower body exercises.)

The problem with this from an experimental perspective is that strength training may cause me to gain muscle mass (which is denser than fat and may cause my weight on the scale to rise, even if I’m not “gaining weight” in the traditional sense).  And it’s very hard for me to know how much of my weight gain these past couple weeks – or the weight gain that’s likely to continue over the next several weeks – is due to adding muscle from these workouts, or from adding good old fashioned pounds in the belly.

So it’s going to be a lot less clear this time what effect my change in daily exercise volumes will have had on my “weight.”

So, why do the strength training, if it will mess up my self-study on exercise and weight?  Simply because I want to stay in good shape without running so darned many miles.  I guess because it’s more important to me that I find a healthy workout going forward than that I resolve the mystery of exercise and weight loss.

But hopefully I’ll gain some useful insights anyway, and will be sure to pass them along through Organaholic.

But a recent article in the Wall Street Journal article raised an entirely different question: Is distance running bad for you?

The picture of poor health?

A pair of new studies announced within the past few weeks have shed some doubt on the long-term health benefits of distance running.  Running is healthy, these studies found, up to about 20 to 25 miles per week, and at speeds of less than 8 miles per hour.  Peak health (based on mortality rates) comes at between 10 to 15 miles of running per week, and at speeds of 10 to 11 miles per week.

That may sound like a lot of running, if you’re not a runner.  And even if you run periodically, an average of 10 to 15 miles a week may be more than you end up with over the course of a year.

But that sort of mileage pales in comparison to what many marathon, half marathon and triathlon runners do regularly.  For my most recent marathon, I trained during peak season at 50 to 65 miles per week, and I ran a half marathon along the way at an average of nearly 8 miles per hour.  There are people out there who run entire marathons in faster than 8 miles per hour.

So, are those of us who are putting up that sort of mileage less healthy than everyone else?  According to the study, yes.  Though overall mortality risk declines up to about 15 miles per week of running, it actually increases rapidly enough after hitting 20 miles per week that higher volume runners are actually at no better mortality risk than utter couch potatoes.

Are the studies right?  Because they’re unpublished, it’s tough to be sure.  All I can tell about them is what I can glean from articles written about the studies as they were initially presented.  And I can’t tell much.  But I do have a couple theories.

One is, it’s possible that high-volume runners do have mortality risk equal to that of couch potatoes, but that it’s not due to the running itself.  Run more than 20 miles per week, and you start burning an awful lot of calories.  Which means you eat an awful lot of calories.  While this is not inherently a problem, it becomes a problem if your diet is as bad as the typical American’s diet is today.  Basically, it means you’re eating an awful lot more of the bad foods you’d eat less of if you didn’t run.  It’s possible that past a certain point the harm of eating so much more of this bad food outweighs the benefit of the exercise that burns it all off.

What’s more, long distance runners these days are plied with sports gels and sports drinks, which have the nutritional profile of a lollipop.  These gels and drinks can help you run long distances, when your body otherwise runs out of glycogen reserves and can benefit from a short-term burst of sugar.  But in the long run, these sugary sports products may wreak the same havoc on your system as candy does.  Only, you’re eating a whole lot more of it.

So any increase in mortality rate from running high weekly volumes could simply be a matter of diet, and corrected by eating healthier – a banana mid-workout rather than a gel; maybe coconut water instead of Gatorade.

Or maybe it’s a matter of statistics.  In a study of 52,000 people, I’d imagine very few of them run 20 to 25 miles per week on a regular basis, year after year, decade after decade.  I don’t know anyone who does, including myself.  And in a sample set that small, one person’s early death can throw a whole study out of whack.  It’s very difficult to get reliable statistical results from super-small sample sets.

But who knows.  Maybe excessive training is unhealthy.  Maybe our bodies truly aren’t designed for it.  Maybe, when it comes to life expectancy, we’re just as well off to sit on the sofa than to train for a marathon.  And maybe optimal health does come from slowly jogging 10-15 miles per week.

But it’s hard for me to believe.  This is one of those studies that comes to a shocking conclusion, but where it’s tough to tell what they actually tested for and actually found.  If the study’s eventually published, we can take a closer look.  Tell me that chronic marathoners or ultramarathoners expose themselves to some sort of health risk, OK.  It’s plausible.  But running 25 miles per week, or running faster than 7 1/2 minute miles?  That raises my chances of an early death?  I’ll take this study into account, but with a large grain of salt, until we see some further evidence that this truly is happening.