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Scientists Find That Lifting Weights Offers No Benefit Over Simply Lowering Them

 

lifting-weights-no-benefit-simply-loweri

 

You go to the gym, you pick things up. But maybe, as the second half of the famous line goes, the focus should really be on putting them down.

According to a recent study performed by researchers at Australia's Edith Cowan University (ECU) and published in the European Journal of Applied Physiology, those who just lower weights can achieve the same results as those who both lift and lower them, despite only doing half the apparent work.

 

The quizzical finding supports previous ECU research showing that low-rep but regular eccentric, or lengthening, muscle contraction, as opposed to concentric or isometric — lifting a weight and holding a weight, respectively — is the best way to increase muscle strength and size.

"We already know only one eccentric muscle contraction a day can increase muscle strength if it is performed five days a week — even if it’s only three seconds a day," ECU Professor and study co-author Ken Nosaka said in a statement, "but concentric or isometric muscle contraction does not provide such an effect."

 

"This latest study," he continued, "shows we can be far more efficient in the time we spend exercising and still see significant results by focusing on eccentric muscle contractions."

For the study, the researchers split participants into four groups of 14. Three of those groups were asked to perform dumbbell curls just twice a week over a five-week period, though with a bit of variation: one group was tasked with just lowering the weights, another only lifted them, and a third group did both, lifting and lowering the dumbbells alternately. The final group, a control, was tasked with doing nothing (relatable). For clarity's sake, we'll call them Team Lower, Team Lift, Team Both, and Team Nothing, respectively.

The results were pretty clear. While all groups attained some kind of benefit, Team Lift only saw improvement in their concentric strength. The other two groups, Team Lower and Team Both, improved in their concentric, eccentric, and isometric strength.

But while Team Both definitely did okay, Team Lower performed better by post-trial muscle thickness, boasting 7.2 percent gain in swoleness versus Team Both's 5.4 percent increase.

 

You'd be forgiven for feeling like this all sounds wildly counterintuitive. After all, we literally called strength training "lifting," and people in weight rooms generally tend to measure success by counting how many pounds they can push up into the air. According to this research, however, that might just be a waste of time.

"In the case of a dumbbell curl," Nosaka continued, "many people may believe the lifting action provides the most benefit, or at least some benefit, but we found concentric muscle contractions contributed little to the training effects."

That being said, if you really just want to lift stuff, you do you. But if you want to maximize your time and energy, maybe consider experimenting with doing fewer reps and focusing on workouts that emphasize lowering motions. Plus, eccentric workouts are a lot easier to do at home!

"With the small amount of daily exercise needed to see results, people don't necessarily even have to go to the gym," Nosaka added, "they can incorporate eccentric exercise into their everyday routine."

 

https://futurism.com/neoscope/lifting-weights-no-benefit-simply-lowering?mc_cid=683f486e2f&mc_eid=d6aea6efd0

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Fat, Sugar, Salt … You’ve Been Thinking About Food All Wrong

Scientists are asking tough questions about the health effects of ultra-processed diets. The answers are complicated—and surprising.
 

In the late 2000s, Carlos Monteiro noticed something strange about the food that Brazilian people were eating. The nutritionist had been poring over three decades’ worth of data from surveys that asked grocery shoppers to note down every item they bought. In more recent surveys, Monteiro noticed, Brazilians were buying way less oil, sugar, and salt than they had in the past. Despite this, people were piling on the pounds. Between 1975 and 2009 the proportion of Brazilian adults who were overweight or obese more than doubled.

This contradiction troubled Monteiro. If people were buying less fat and sugar, why were they getting bigger? The answer was right there in the data. Brazilians hadn’t really cut down on fat, salt, and sugar—they were just consuming these nutrients in an entirely new form. People were swapping traditional foods—rice, beans, and vegetables—for prepackaged bread, sweets, sausages, and other snacks. The share of biscuits and soft drinks in Brazilians’ shopping baskets had tripled and quintupled, respectively, since the first household survey in 1974. The change was noticeable everywhere. When Monteiro first qualified as a doctor in 1972, he’d worried that Brazilians weren’t getting enough to eat. By the late 2000s, his country was suffering with the exact opposite problem.

At a glance, Monteiro’s findings seem obvious. If people eat too much unhealthy food, they put on more weight. But the nutritionist wasn’t satisfied with that explanation. He thought that something fundamental had shifted in our food system, and scientists needed a new way to talk about it. For more than a century, nutrition science has focused on nutrients: Eat less saturated fat, avoid excess sugar, get enough vitamin C, and so on. But Monteiro wanted a new way of categorizing food that emphasized how products were made, not just what was in them. It wasn’t just ingredients that made a food unhealthy, Monteiro thought. It was the whole system: how the food was processed, how quickly we ate it, and the way it was sold and marketed. “We are proposing a new theory to understand the relationship between diet and health,” Monteiro says.

 

Monteiro created a new food classification system—called NOVA—that breaks things down into four categories. Least worrisome are minimally processed foods, such as fruits, vegetables, and unprocessed meats. Then come processed culinary ingredients (oils, butter, and sugar), and after that processed foods (tinned vegetables, smoked meats, freshly baked bread, and simple cheeses)—substances to be used carefully as part of a healthy diet. And then there are ultra-processed foods.

There are a bunch of reasons why a product might fall into the ultra-processed category. It might be made using “industrial processes” like extrusion, interesterification, carbonation, hydrogenation, molding, or prefrying. It could contain additives designed to make it hyper-palatable, or preservatives that help it stay stable at room temperature. Or it might contain high levels of fat, sugar, and salt in combinations that aren’t usually found in whole foods. What all the foods share, Monteiro says, is that they are designed to displace freshly prepared dishes and keep you coming back for more, and more, and more. “Every day from breakfast to dinner you are consuming something that was engineered to be overconsumed,” says Monteiro.

 
 

The concept of ultra-processed food has caught on in a big way since it was first introduced in 2009: Brazil, France, Israel, Ecuador, and Peru have all made NOVA part of their dietary guidelines. Countless health and diet blogs extol the virtues of avoiding ultra-processed foods—shunning them is one thing that both followers of a carnivorous and a raw vegan diet can actually agree on. The label has been used to criticize plant-based meat companies, who in turn have embraced the label. Impossible calls its plant-based burger “unapologetically processed.” Others have pointed out that there’s no way we can feed billions of people without relying on processed food.

The results of the study surprised Hall. On the ultra-processed diet, people ate around 500 extra calories per day and put on about two pounds. When people were on the whole-food diet, they ate fewer calories and lost weight—this is despite the fact that the meals on offer had roughly the same nutrient compositions. To Hall, this implied that there was something other than salt, sugar, and fat content that was causing people to eat excess calories and gain weight. “It suggested that there was something different about this NOVA categorization system,” he says. Maybe there is more to food than its constituent parts.

Hall’s study drew a clear link between junk food and excess calorie consumption, but it can’t tell us why people on the ultra-processed diet ate more. After he published the results, Hall was flooded with suggestions from other scientists. Some thought it was because junk food is more calorie-dense. Since processed foods are often deep-fried and high in fat, they pack in more calories per gram than whole foods. Or maybe it was because junk food was eaten more quickly; in the study, people on the ultra-processed diet ate significantly faster than those eating whole foods. Other scientists thought that additives might be playing a role, or that junk food changed the gut microbiome in a way that influenced calorie intake.

A big factor might be the effect that ultra-processed foods have on our brain. Alexandra DiFeliceantonio is an assistant professor at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at Virginia Tech Carilion who studies how junk food interacts with the brain’s reward systems. “We know a lot more about fat, sugars, and carbohydrates, and how those are signaled in the gut and to the brain. We know a lot less about the role of ultra-processing in altering any of those signals,” says DiFeliceantonio.

Her hypothesis is that since ultra-processed foods are rich in easily available calories, they induce a potent reward response in our brains that keeps us coming back for more.

DiFeliceantonio’s work draws parallels between junk food and the tobacco industry. In an editorial for the journal Addiction, DiFeliceantonio and her colleague Ashley Geardhardt argue that highly processed foods should be considered addictive substances if we measure them against the standards set for tobacco products. But until we really understand the science behind how ultra-processed food impacts our bodies, policy will always lag behind. “We saw big shifts in things like tobacco policy and policy for opioids when we had really solid, scientific, biological data,” says DiFeliceantonio.

Taking on Big Food

So what should health authorities do about it? Government guidelines in Brazil advise people to avoid ultra-processed foods altogether, while French guidelines recommend limiting consumption. But other countries’ guidelines don’t refer to ultra-processed foods at all. In 2021 an independent report commissioned by the UK government proposed a series of reforms aimed squarely at the ultra-processed food industry. The report recommended a tax on sugar and salt used in processed foods, and for large companies to report how much unhealthy food they were selling. The government’s response, published a year later, largely ignored these recommendations. In the UK’s official nutrition guidelines, the only reference to processed food is that people should eat no more than 70 grams of red or processed meat each day.

 

While the role of processing in our diets has come under greater focus, public agencies have been slow to respond. Stanford nutritionist Christopher Gardner sits on the US Dietary Guidelines Committee and is a member of the American Heart Association. “For both of them, processed food is an issue they have to address next, because the public is so interested in this,” he says. “We don’t have a position yet. We need a position on this.”

Hall, meanwhile, is running a new study to pinpoint what it is about ultra-processed foods that causes us to eat excess calories, and the first participants have already arrived at the clinical research center in Bethesda. The study is similar to his previous experiment, but this time he’ll be varying the ultra-processed diet he gives volunteers to test whether the energy density or palatability of the food influences how much people eat. If he can figure out what it is in ultra-processed foods that leads people to overeat, it might help design better policies to help people eat healthier diets, or lead food companies to reformulate their products.

It might also mean that we narrow down our definition of ultra-processed food. Packaged and processed foods are such an important source of nutrition for so many people that we need to be careful before we demonize the entire category, says Hall. They’re convenient, tasty, and cheap. In Hall’s 2019 study, the weekly cost of the ultra-processed meals was $45 cheaper than the whole food diet. “If you design policies to try to eliminate those foods without at the same time providing cheap, inexpensive, easy, convenient alternatives, you’re going to have a lot of people who are going to experience negative consequences of that,” he says.

Things get even trickier when you factor in the climate impact of our diets. Most plant-based meats are highly processed, but that doesn’t necessarily make them less healthy than their meat equivalents. Meat substitutes tend to be lower in calories and saturated fat and higher in fiber, but lower in protein. But on an environmental level, plant-based beef is much better than the real thing. “If you’re comparing a highly processed beef burger or pork sausage with its plant-based equivalent, then the plant burger or sausage is generally going to have lower environmental impacts,” says Tara Garnett, a food researcher at the University of Oxford. Monteiro admits that ultra-processed foods are sometimes better than their unprocessed alternatives, but he’s concerned that plant-based burgers might displace other, healthier plant-based foods.

Even there the picture is complex. Christopher Gardner ran a trial where people swapped animal meat with plant-based meats for eight weeks. After the plant-based phase of the trial, people lost weight and had low cholesterol concentrations. When it comes to plant-based meats, Gardner says the ultra-processed label might be doing the category a disservice. 

Monteiro thinks that we can’t afford to wait until we know everything about ultra-processed foods before public health bodies take action. “We are dealing with something very complex. It will take many years to understand all of these mechanisms. But do we need to wait until we know all of this to start to do something to stop this?” he says. For now the science on ultra-processed foods is moving along slowly, but the debate is raging louder than ever.

Updated 2-24-2022 11:30 GMT: Alexandra DiFeliceantonio’s academic affiliation was corrected.

 

https://www.wired.com/story/ultra-processed-foods/?utm_source=pocket-newtab-global-en-GB

 

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How this unusual exercise while sitting down can help lower your blood sugar and fat levels

 

It’s called a soleus push-up and it involves activating that muscle in your calf by “tiptoeing” while sitting down. CNA Lifestyle asks experts to find out just how effective this can be.

 

iStock-1437717937.jpg?itok=CHUzkZeG

 

Here’s an exercise that many sedentary individuals and office workers could get behind: Soleus push-ups. No, it isn’t an extreme or even a levelled-up version of the push-up; it doesn’t even involve the same muscles.

Instead, much like how some of us like to jerk our legs up and down when seated, this exercise involves starting with your foot flat on the floor, then raising your heel off the ground to its highest points and letting it fall back down. Think of it as doing a tiptoeing exercise while sitting down.

The key takeaway is that the action, when done correctly, activates the soleus muscle and boosts oxidative metabolism during which blood sugar is utilised at “high levels for hours, not just minutes”, said its creator Marc Hamilton, a professor of Health and Human Performance at the University of Houston, USA.

Not only that, keeping the soleus muscle metabolism humming is also effective at doubling the normal rate of fat burning between meals, he said.

In his study published in iScience in 2022, test subjects were given a glucose drink each before performing soleus push-ups in a controlled setting for 270 minutes spread out over the day. That’s 4.5 hours of leg shaking if you’re counting. The results: There was a 52 per cent improvement in blood glucose fluctuations and 60 per cent less insulin requirement that lasted over three hours.

According to Prof Hamilton, the 600 muscles in your body usually contribute only about 15 per cent of your total body’s oxidative metabolism in the three hours after consuming carbohydrate.

“Despite the fact that the soleus is only 1 per cent the body weight, it is capable of raising its metabolic rate during soleus push-up contractions to easily double, even sometimes triple, the whole-body carbohydrate oxidation.”

Elevated levels of blood sugar and fats have always been associated with metabolic syndrome, which is a collection of health issues occurring together, including high blood pressure, Type 2 diabetes, stroke and heart disease.

What this could mean is that the very leg-shaking action that many of us regard as a bad habit could well help you lower your blood sugar level – and reduce your risk of metabolic diseases such as heart disease, stroke and Type 2 diabetes.

So why is this muscle so special? Are there other muscles in our bodies that could also deliver the same benefits? And should you give this push-up a shot?

1.jpg?itok=iqSTjkO0 Illustration showing the back of the right leg. (Art: iStock/Vector Mine)

WHAT IS THE SOLEUS MUSCLE AND HOW DOES IT WORK?

The soleus muscle is part of the calf muscle. If you want to get more specific, it starts behind the knee and extends down about 10cm to 15cm to above the heel bone before it merges with some connective tissues to form the Achilles heel, said Dr Nicholas Leong, the registrar of Tan Tock Seng Hospital’s Sports Medicine & Surgery Clinic.

Whether it’s the soleus muscle, biceps or glutes, all muscles rely on various combinations of three main fuels to keep you moving: Glycogen, blood sugar (or glucose) and fats. But which fuel your muscles prefer to tap on depends on the activity intensity and duration, said Clinical Associate Professor Mandy Zhang, who is a consultant with Changi General Hospital’s Department of Sport and Exercise Medicine.

“For example, during high-intense activities such as high-intensity interval training and weight lifting, the muscles primarily use glucose as an energy source,” she said. “When it comes to endurance activities such as long-distance running and cycling, the muscles typically use both fat and carbohydrate (which breaks down into glucose) in a slow energy burn.”

istock-622809280.jpg?itok=fwaQLuPe During high-intense activities such as weight lifting, the muscles primarily use glucose as an energy source. (Photo: iStock/milanvirijevic)

There are also the muscle fibres to consider. There are two types intermingled within any single muscle in your body: Fast-twitch muscle fibres and slow-twitch muscle fibres, said Dr Leong.

Because slow-twitch muscle fibres, such as the ones found in the soleus muscle, are more resistant to fatigue, they can be exercised longer, which “can lead to greater blood glucose being utilised”, he said. It also explains how the test subjects were able to keep up the soleus push-ups for hours.

Slow-twitch muscle fibres are also found in the back for posture maintenance, said Dr Leong. “To date, I am not aware of any studies that investigate the activation of other small muscles and the corresponding increase in whole body oxidative metabolic rate.”

HOW DOES IT COMPARE TO WALKING, WHICH IS ANOTHER ENTRY-LEVEL ACTIVITY?

While the soleus push-up movement might resemble walking (raising the heel and contracting the calf), Prof Hamilton said that it is the exact opposite. When walking, the body minimises the amount of energy used. However, the soleus push-up makes the soleus muscle use as much energy as possible for a long duration, he said.

Broadly speaking, said Dr Leong who isn’t involved in the study, “exercising at lower intensities and a longer duration” would already lead to a “greater proportion of fats and blood glucose being utilised”.

And if you involve large muscle groups such as the legs and core when you run or cycle, you’d use even more blood glucose and fats, he said. “The rate of aerobic energy expenditure per minute is actually higher for walking as compared to soleus push-ups.”

But, of course, not everyone of us has the time or energy to run 2.4km or even walk in the park. “The soleus push-ups would be useful for a deskbound individual at work, especially if he is seated for the majority of the day,” said Dr Leong. However, more research would be needed, including a direct comparative study on walking versus soleus push-ups, he said.

istock-472618538.jpg?itok=BYoNmZYn Unlike walking, the soleus push-up supposedly makes the soleus muscle use as much energy as possible for a long duration. (Photo: iStock/lzf)

CAN THE SOLEUS PUSH-UPS HELP TO PREVENT DEEP VEIN THROMBOSIS ON LONG-HAUL FLIGHTS?

Dr John Wang, a general surgeon specialising in vascular and endovascular surgery at PanAsia Surgery, isn’t involved in the study but he hypothesised that soleus push-ups might help decrease deep vein thrombosis (DVT) risks.

And it’s not only by repeating muscular contraction-relaxation to compress and decompress the veins to improve blood flow, he said. The compression-relaxation effect could also induce the veins’ inner lining cells to produce clot-preventing nitric oxide.

But can you forgo the compression socks altogether if you perform soleus push-ups on the plane? “There isn't any good-quality, head-to-head study that compares which modality is superior at preventing DVT,” said Dr Wang.

“A more effective way of preventing blood stagnation and DVT is to increase venous return by using the entire lower limb pump system, including the thighs, calves and feet. This means getting up and walking for a few minutes every hour or so,” he said. If you aren’t able to get up, the soleus push-ups could be performed every 20-minute cycle. 

istock-1401407755.jpg?itok=_preEuqS Can the soleus push-up help with blood circulation in the lower extremities? (Photo: iStock/Valeria Blanc)

SHOULD YOU GIVE IT A TRY?

You got to admit: 270 minutes is a lot of time to spend on leg shaking. “The study was performed in a highly controlled, supervised laboratory condition, and further research needs to be carried out to investigate if it can be replicated successfully in a real-life, free-living environment,” said Clin Assoc Prof Zhang, who isn’t part of the research.

Dr Leong agreed that the soleus push-ups’ real-life application has yet to be determined: “No matter how low the intensity, performing it for a prolonged duration can lead to musculoskeletal symptoms such as joint pain, muscle cramps and strains with pain that may persist even after cessation of the exercise”.

As for the exercise’s effects on blood glucose and fat levels, “it has some promising findings but further research and clinical trials are needed” to confirm the benefits, he said.

Clin Assoc Prof Zhang said that it is also “important to note that the effect and magnitude of the results may differ in individuals with already elevated blood sugars such as those with diabetes”, stressing that soleus push-ups should not replace blood sugar-lowering medication.

In fact, the push-ups should not replace any other forms of exercise, she said. “Soleus push-ups are considered a low-intensity, low-effort exercise and do not significantly improve cardiorespiratory fitness.”

The push-ups are better added to a workout routine that already includes aerobic and strengthening exercises than as a standalone, she said. “We should still aim for 150 to 300 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic activity per week.”

So, should you give soleus push-ups a shot? All the doctors that CNA Lifestyle spoke to agreed that they are “worth a try” as the movement is easy and can minimise inactivity. “In addition, soleus push-ups can be performed barefooted, without the need for sports shoes, and do not require extra space or venue,” said Clin Assoc Prof Zhang.

Time to shake a leg. Or two.

 

https://cnalifestyle.channelnewsasia.com/wellness/soleus-pushups-oxidative-metabolism-diabetes-high-blood-pressure-stroke-heart-disease-353596

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