Finally, All Natural Bonne Bell!

Hi, my name is Lauren, and I have a chapstick & lip gloss addiction.

Seriously, this isn't a joke. For those of you who know me, you're already aware that I carry around 10 types of different types of chapsticks and lip glosses with me, wherever I go. It's crazy, and it genuinely is an issue. I have a chapstick in every drawer in my place, in my car, in every bag (other than my purse), etc. It's sick!

Due to my serious addiction, I'm usually on top of the hottest, shimmeriest and yummiest chapsticks/lip glosses out there. However, there are many I steer clear of due to companies who test on animals, use animal products or harmful ingredients. Bonne Bell was always my favorite in my younger days (when my ignorance was bliss). Their colorful displays have teased me for years as I've walked by them in the drugstores with all of their enticing flavors and yummy smells. However, the other day at Target the NEW All Natural Bonne Bell chapsticks caught my eye!!! I stood there in disbelief for a few minutes reading the labels, I couldn't believe it was true! I totally shrieked and proceeded to buy all four flavors. (Oops, did I just say that out loud?)

So for all those out there with an addiction like mine, swing by the Bonne Bell section of the drugstore and look for the new chapsticks! (I just finished the Pink Guava...good stuff!!!)

Also, Bonne Bell never tests on animals, which is always a lovely quality about a company. =)

Keep it fresh!
- Lauren

Intermittent fasting as a form of liberation

I have been doing a lot of reading over the years on isolated hunter-gatherer populations; see three references at the end of this post, all superb sources (Chagnon’s book on the Yanomamo, in particular, is an absolute page turner). I also take every opportunity I have to talk with anthropologists and other researchers who have had field experience with hunter-gatherer groups. Even yesterday I was talking to a researcher who spent many years living among isolated native Brazilian groups in the Amazon.

Maybe I have been reading too much into those descriptions, but it seems to me that one distinctive feature of many adults in hunter-gatherer populations, when compared with adults in urban populations, is that the hunter-gatherers are a lot less obsessed with food.

Interestingly, this seems to be a common characteristic of physically active children. They want to play, and eating is often an afterthought, an interruption of play. Sedentary children, who play indoors, can and often want to eat while they play.

Perhaps adult hunter-gatherers are more like physically active children than adults in modern urban societies. Maybe this is one of the reasons why adult hunter-gatherers have much less body fat. Take a look at the photo below (click to enlarge), from Wikipedia. It was reportedly taken in 1939, and shows three Australian aboriginals.

Hunter-gatherers do not have supermarkets, and active children need food to grow healthy. Adult urbanites have easy access to an abundance of food in supermarkets, and they do not need food to grow, at least not vertically.

Still, adult hunter-gatherers and children who are physically active are generally much less concerned about food than adults in modern urban societies.

It seems illogical, a bit like a mental disorder of some sort that has been plaguing adults in modern urban societies. A mental disorder that contributes to making them obese.

Modern urbanites are constantly worried about food. And also about material possessions, bills, taxes etc. They want to accumulate as much wealth as their personal circumstances allow them, so that they can retire and pay for medical expenses. They must worry about paying for their children’s education. Food is one of their many worries; for many it is the biggest of them all. Too much food makes you fat, too little makes you lose muscle (not really true, but a widespread belief).

Generally speaking, intermittent fasting is very good for human health. Humans seem to have evolved to be episodic eaters, being in the fasted state most of the time. This is perhaps why intermittent fasting significantly reduces levels of inflammation markers, promotes the recycling of “messed up” proteins (e.g., glycated proteins), and increases leptin and insulin sensitivity. It is something natural. I am talking about fasting 24 h at a time (or a bit more, but not much more than that), with plenty of water but no calories. Even skipping a meal now and then, when you are busy with other things, is a form of intermittent fasting.

Now, the idea that our hominid ancestors were starving most of the time does not make a lot of sense, at least not when we think about Homo sapiens, as opposed to earlier ancestors (e.g., the Australopithecines). Even archaic Homo sapiens, dating back to 500 thousand years ago, were probably too smart to be constantly starving. Moreover, the African savannas, where Homo sapiens emerged, were not the type of environment where a smart and social species would be hungry for too long.

Yet, intermittent fasting probably happened frequently among our Homo sapiens ancestors, for the same reason that it happens among hunter-gatherers and active children today. My guess is that, by and large, our ancestors were simply not too worried about food. They ate it because they were hungry, probably at regular times – as most hunter-gatherers do. They skipped meals from time to time.

They certainly did not eat to increase their metabolism, raise their thyroid hormone levels, or have a balanced macronutrient intake.

There were no doubt special occasions when people gathered for a meal as a social activity, but probably the focus was on the social activity, and secondarily on the food.

Of course, they did not have doughnuts around, or foods engineered to make people addicted to them. That probably made things a little easier.

Successful body fat loss through intermittent fasting requires a change in mindset.

References:

Boaz, N.T., & Almquist, A.J. (2001). Biological anthropology: A synthetic approach to human evolution. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Chagnon, N.A. (1977). Yanomamo: The fierce people. New York, NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Price, W.A. (2008). Nutrition and physical degeneration. La Mesa, CA: Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation.

Sometimes You Just Get Lucky

I went fishing last Saturday on Fidalgo island with some friends.


That's a picture of the trophy minnow I caught after a full day of fishing. I'm thinking about having it mounted.

We made out a little better the next day.


Here are two of my other hunter-gatherer adventures for those who are interested:

Foraging
Hunting

Is heavy physical activity a major trigger of death by sudden cardiac arrest? Not in Oregon

The idea that heavy physical activity is a main trigger of heart attacks is widespread. Often endurance running and cardio-type activities are singled out. Some people refer to this as “death by running”.

Good cardiology textbooks, such as the Mayo Clinic Cardiology, tend to give us a more complex and complete picture. So do medical research articles that report on studies of heart attacks based on comprehensive surveys.

Reddy and colleagues (2009) studied sudden cardiac arrest events followed by death from 2002 to 2005 in Multnomah County in Oregon. This study was part of the ongoing Oregon Sudden Unexpected Death Study. Multnomah County has an area of 435 square miles, and had a population of over 677 thousand at the time of the study. The full reference to the article and a link to a full-text version are at the end of this post.

The researchers grouped deaths by sudden cardiac arrests (SCAs) according to the main type of activity being performed before the event. Below is how the authors defined the activities, quoted verbatim from the article. MET is a measure of the amount of energy spent in the activity; one MET is the amount of energy spent by a person sitting quietly.

- Sleep (MET 0.9): subjects who were sleeping when they sustained SCA.
- Light activity (MET 1.0–3.4): included bathing, dressing, cooking, cleaning, feeding, household walking and driving.
- Moderate activity (MET 3.5–5.9): included walking for exercise, mowing lawn, gardening, working in the yard, dancing.
- Heavy activity (MET score ≥6): included sports such as tennis, running, jogging, treadmill, skiing, biking.
- Sexual activity (MET score 1.3): included acts of sexual intercourse.

What did they find? Not what many people would expect.

The vast majority of the people dying of sudden cardiac arrest were doing things that fit the “light activity” group above prior to their death. This applies to both genders. The figure below (click to enlarge) shows the percentages of men and women who died from sudden cardiac arrest, grouped by activity type.

Sudden cardiac arrests were also categorized as witnessed or un-witnessed. For witnessed, someone saw them happening. For un-witnessed, the person was seen alive, and within 24 hours had died. So the data for witnessed sudden cardiac arrests is a bit more reliable. The table below displays the distribution of mean age, gender and known coronary artery disease (CAD) in those with witnessed sudden cardiac arrest.

Look at the bottom row, showing those with known coronary artery disease. Again, light activity is the main trigger. Sleep comes second. The numbers within parentheses refer to percentages within each activity group. Those percentages are not very helpful in the identification of the most important triggers, although they do suggest that coronary artery disease is a major risk factor. For example, among those who died from sudden cardiac arrest while having sex, 57 percent had known coronary artery disease. For light activity, 36 percent had known coronary artery disease.

As a caveat, it is worth noting that heavy activity appears to be more of a trigger in younger individuals than in older ones. This may simply reflect the patterns of activities at different ages. However, this does not seem to properly account for the large differences observed in triggers; the standard deviation for age in the heavy activity group was large enough to include plenty of seniors. Still, it would have been nice to see a multivariate analysis controlling for various effects, including age.

So what is going on here?

The authors give us a hint. The real culprit may be bottled up emotional stress and sleep disorders; the latter may be caused by stress, as well as by obesity and other related problems. They have some data that points in those directions. That makes some sense.

We humans have evolved “fight-or-flight” mechanisms that involve large hormonal discharges in response to stressors. Our ancestors needed those. For example, they needed those to either fight or run for their lives in response to animal attacks.

Modern humans experience too many stressors while sitting down, as in stressful car commutes and nasty online interactions. The stresses cause “fight-or-flight” hormonal discharges, but are followed by neither “fight” nor “flight” in most cases. This cannot be very good for us.

Death by running!? More like death by not running!

Reference:

Reddy, P.R., Reinier, K., Singh, T., Mariani, R., Gunson, K., Jui, J., & Chugh, S.S. (2009). Physical activity as a trigger of sudden cardiac arrest: The Oregon Sudden Unexpected Death Study. International Journal of Cardiology, 131(3), 345–349.