Dr. Gabe Mirkin's Fitness and Health E-Zine

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Increasing Exercise after Age 50 Prolongs Lives

Men who start or increase their exercise programs after
age fifty live longer than those who remain at their present
activity levels, according to a study in the British Medical Journal
(March 2009).

More than 2200 men were checked at ages 60, 60, 70, 77 and 82 years.

The greater the increase in exercise duration over that span,
the longer their lives were extended. The reduction in early death
from increasing exercise was the same as for men who stopped smoking.

Lack of exercise is associated with obesity, diabetes,
heart attacks, strokes, osteoporosis, and cancer. Exercising
regularly more than halves your chance of dying prematurely
(Archives of Internal Medicine, December 2007).

Yet more than 50 percent of North Americans do not exercise.

Exercise prevents disease and increases life span by
many mechanisms. The major benefit probably comes from the
contracting muscles themselves.

A high rise in blood sugars and fats after meals damages cells.
When blood sugar levels rise too high, sugar sticks to the surface
of cell membranes.

Once there, it can never get off, eventually killing the cells
and leading to blindness, heart attacks, strokes and the other
consequences of uncontrolled diabetes.

Contracting muscles draw sugar and fat so rapidly from the
bloodstream that they usually prevent blood sugar levels from
rising too high. This effect is maximized during exercise.

The effect is maintained for about half hour after you stop
exercising and gradually tapers off until it disappears after
about 18 hours. That explains why you get maximum benefit by
exercising every day (rather than three times a week), and why
greater benefit is gained by exercising more intensely for longer
durations.

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Reports from DrMirkin.com

Belly fat
http://www.drmirkin.com/diabetes/1127.html

Peyronie's disease
http://www.drmirkin.com/men/1241.html

Monoglycerides and diglycerides
http://www.drmirkin.com/archive/6221.html

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Dear Dr. Mirkin: Since I started to train seriously for marathons,
my wife has complained that I have markedly reduced my interest
in making love. What can I do to keep running and satisfy my
wife?

Get a medical check-up. If your doctor finds nothing
wrong with you, you may be training too much. Most endurance
athletes have normal blood levels of the male hormones,
testosterone and dihydro-testosterone, and lose neither sexual
desire nor sexual performance (Journal of Endocrinological
Investigation, October 2008).

Endurance athletes who have low levels of testosterone
usually have normal blood levels of LH and FSH, the brain
hormones that control testicular production of testosterone.
Defective testicular production of testosterone is usually
associated with very high levels of brain hormones. That means
that reduced sexual desire associated with endurance training is
governed by the brain, not testicular damage, and is often part
of an overtraining syndrome.

Training for competition is done by taking an intense
workout on one day, feeling sore on the next, and going at
reduced intensity for as long as it takes for the soreness to go
away. Taking intense workouts when you feel soreness causes
muscle injuries and fatigue that affects all your organ systems,
including your sexuality.

Once you develop an overtraining syndrome, it can take a very
long time to recover. If this has happened to you, I recommend
jogging slowly each day and stopping each workout immediately
when your legs feel heavy or sore. When you feel better, you
can start to train intensely again, but be sure to include slow
recovery days in your training program.

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Dear Dr. Mirkin: Is it true that diet sodas cause diabetes?

I do not think so, even though three major studies show
that people who drink diet sodas daily have a 67 percent greater
risk for diabetes and a 36 percent greater risk for metabolic
syndrome (low good HDL cholesterol, high triglycerides and
abdominal obesity) which usually leads to diabetes (Diabetes
Care,. January 2009).

An earlier study found that diabetics who drank one or more
diet sodas per day had hemoglobin A1C levels 0.7 percent higher
than those who drank none (Annals of Epidemiology, September 2006).
Hemoglobin A1C (HBA1c) measures blood sugar control.

These studies show an association but do not prove cause-and-effect.
If diet sodas do cause diabetes, no one has yet found a reasonable
explanation.

Diet sodas do not raise blood sugar levels significantly. The
association between diet sodas and diabetes may be that people
who drink diet sodas are more likely to be overweight and struggling
to control their weight, not exercising, and not avoiding refined
carbohydrates in other foods (sugar and flour).

Diabetes is an environmental disease caused by these factors
plus lack of vitamin D.

The same factors that cause diabetes appear to lead people to choose
diet sodas.

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Recipe of the Week:

Spaghetti Squash Pad Thai
http://www.drmirkin.com/recipes/spagthai.html

You'll find lots of recipes and helpful tips in
The Good Food Book - FREE at
http://www.drmirkin.com/goodfood/index.html

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Greater Endurance with Aging According to Dr. Gabe Mirkin

In his January 18 ezine, Dr.Mirkin says:

I'm 74 years old and ride my bicycle more than 200 miles
per week, often in pace lines with younger riders. I have noticed
that younger riders can easily pull away from me in short bursts,
but I keep coming back on them and seem to be better able to
keep up with their accelerations as the ride progresses.

The latest issue of Exercise and Sports Sciences Reviews
(January 2009) reviews the entire world's literature to show that
endurance improves as you age. Wow!

The maximal muscle contraction force occurs when you do
a single muscle contraction with all your might. Even though older
people are not as strong as younger ones, many studies show that
they can retain maximal force after many contractions far longer
than younger people can.

Here's the theory and evidence to explain why aging
improves endurance. Muscles are made up of millions of
individual fibers just as a rope is made up of many different
threads. Each muscle fiber is enervated by a single nerve. As you
age, you lose nerves throughout your body and when you lose the
nerve that enervates a specific fiber, you also lose that muscle
fiber.

Muscle fibers are classified as type I endurance fibers
and type II strength and speed fibers. With aging, you lose far
more nerves that enervate the strength and speed fibers than
those that enervate the endurance ones. So, with aging, you
lose strength but you retain a greater proportion of endurance
fibers.

Muscle fatigue comes from the accumulation of waste
products that occurs while food is converted to energy to
power your muscles. Scientists can measure fatigue by measuring
the accumulation of acid (H+), Phosphate (Pi) and protonated
phosphate (H2PO4) in muscle. With the same percentage of their
maximal muscle force, older people accumulate far lower levels of
these end products than younger people do.
Therefore even though older people are weaker, they can maintain
their forceful contractions far longer than younger people can
and they have greater endurance.

This exciting recent data will encourage me to train even harder.

Dr.Mirkin's reports and opinions are for information only,
and are not intended to diagnose or prescribe. For your specific
diagnosis and treatment,consult your doctor or health care
provider. For more information
visit http://www.drmirkin.com

The Good Food Book Online

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Dr. Gabe Mirkin's Fitness and Health E-Zine

Salt Helps Retain Fluid

September 7, 2008
Researchers at Loughborough University in Leicestershire, UK show that the salty drinks help your body to retain fluid and therefore increase the time that you can exercise, particularly in the heat (European Journal of Applied Physiology, July 2008). They fed drinks of four different salt concentrations to competitive cyclists. The higher the concentration of salt, the less urine they produced. This shows that salt helps their bodies to retain water so they will have more fluid available to cool their bodies in the heat. However, this study showed that it did not improve their performance.

In 1942, the United States Government asked James Gamble of Harvard Medical school to set up guidelines for soldiers who must fight in the heat. His classic, impeccable experiments are still the basis for recommendations today for fluid and mineral replacements for athletes.

He showed that the only mineral that needs to be replaced during exercise or other hard work in hot weather is sodium. So when you exercise in the heat, make sure that you take in extra salt, either in a sports drink or in salted foods such as peanuts or pretzels.

If you are concerned about the effect of this extra salt on your blood pressure, buy a simple blood pressure cuff and take your blood pressure weekly, just to make sure that you are not taking too much salt or exercising too little.

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Reports from DrMirkin.com

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Is monosodium glutamate (MSG) harmful?

Many people still avoid MSG as the culprit in "Chinese restaurant syndrome", even though no scientific studies were ever able to show that MSG causes headaches, flushing, tingling or anything else. However, a recent study of Chinese peasants suggests that MSG may cause weight gain (Obesity, August 2008).

The subjects were divided into three groups, based on the amount of MSG used, and those in the group that ate the most MSG were nearly three times more likely to be overweight than non-users. Previous studies on mice and rats found the same effect. Dr. Ka He, the lead author of the study at the University of North Carolina, concludes that MSG makes food taste better so people eat more.

It's not easy to avoid MSG even if you read food labels. Everyone eats significant amounts of monosodium glutamate because all foods that contain protein have a building block amino acid called glutamic acid which is converted in the body to glutamate.

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If exercise helps to prevent cancer, what is the mechanism?

We do not really know how exercise helps to prevent cancer, but the most widely accepted theory is that exercise helps to keep the mitochondria in cells from producing as many free radicals. Free radicals, produced when mitochondria convert food to energy, can attach to the DNA and damage it to cause uncontrolled cell growth.

More than 50 studies associate regular exercise with lowered cancer risk One of the latest, from Tokyo, followed almost 80,000 men and women for ten years (American Journal of Epidemiology, August 2008).

The more these men and women exercised, the less likely they were to develop cancer. The decreased risk was greater in women than men, especially among the elderly. Exercise appeared to be particularly associated with reduced risk for cancers of the colon, liver or pancreas in men and for cancer of the stomach in women.