Articles
AI Predicts Alzheimer’s 6 Years Before Diagnosis – UCSF
If you know anyone who has been effected by Alzheimer’s, you know how devastating the disease can be, both for the person effected and their loved ones. It takes a significant toll on everyone, and worst off, there is no clear treatment for the disease. On a positive note, I recently read The End of Alzheimer’s by Dale Bredesen in which he offers a detailed treatment plan called ReCode that he has seen have very positive results with. And Guess what? It’s is not new sexy medication either, it is based on ancestral health and lifestyle practices! Even with some promising results from applying ReCode there are no clear signs that you are going to get Alzheimer’s, the first signs are usually memory problems at which point the disease has already taken hold.
In the article above though, scientists have described how they taught a computer to recognize the signs of Alzheimer’s based on showing it some PET scans of patient’s brains.
To train the algorithm, Sohn fed it images from the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI), a massive public dataset of PET scans from patients who were eventually diagnosed with either Alzheimer’s disease, mild cognitive impairment or no disorder. Eventually, the algorithm began to learn on its own which features are important for predicting the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease and which are not.
By combining something like the machine learning algorithm described in the article with Dr. Bredesen’s ReCode protocol, one could imagine an effective treatment for Alzheimer’s before the person even shows signs of cognitive decline!
Chipotle Now Offering Paleo, Keto, and Whole 30 Meals – CNN
Chipotle has long been one of the few fast food restaurants health minded people would eat at. I am no different, I love Mexican food! Their meat and ingredients are probably the highest quality of any national fast food”chain. In addition, it was always pretty easy to create your own version of their bowls that were Paleo/Keto friendly. Now it appears they are formalizing this on their menus by specifically offering meals for people who are following a Paleo, Keto, or Whole 30 diet. It is great to see a national food chain like this making an effort to satisfy the needs of their health minded customers.
Accomplish More: How to Replace Busyness with Productivity – Chris Kresser
One of the things I struggle with is getting everything done that I want/need to. Being a family man, with 2 kids and a wife, a full time job as a software engineer, a side hustle as a health coach, and an avid obstacle course racer that likes to workout, it does not leave much time for anything else….you know like relaxing 😉 I am always looking for productivity “hacks” that allow me to do as much as possible with the time I have. Chris Kresser has put together a nice article with some suggestions on how to be as productive as possible with your time. Check it out!.
DOES RECENT TMAO RESEARCH SUGGEST THAT THE PALEO DIET CAUSES HEART DISEASE? – Paleo Magazine
Trimethylamine N-oxide, or TMAO, has often been used as an argument against following the Paleo diet due to the suggestion that increased TMAO levels have been associated with heart diseases. Since TMAO is increased due to increased protein intake, and people often correlate Paleo with large amounts of protein then you often hear detractors associate the Paleo diet with an increased risk of heart disease.
This article makes a good argument as to why a Paleo diet does not cause you to have an increase risk of heart disease.
The first reason not to fear TMAO is that it has not definitively been shown to cause cardiovascular disease or any other medical problem. It has simply been correlated with cardiovascular disease and a variety of other medical conditions such as insulin resistance/diabetes, cancer, neurological conditions, and renal disease. Put another way, people who have these medical problems are more likely to also have high TMAO. But that doesn’t mean that TMAO caused the medical problem.
In fact, the opposite could be true: Poor diet and health disrupts the microbiome, elevating TMAO, while at the same time, separately, the same poor lifestyle also leads to medical problems.
Correlation, we must always remember, does not equal causation. In fact, an October 2018 review article in Nutrients concluded, “It is questioned whether TMAO is the mediator of or a bystander in the disease process.” Two other recent review articles concluded, “The implication that TMAO itself is a causative factor for cardiovascular and other diseases is controversial,” and, “The mechanism by which TMAO promotes atherosclerosis also remains speculative.”
The second primary reason not to fear animal protein is that long-term TMAO elevation is known to be caused by dysbiosis (an imbalance of the microbiome), not by a serving of animal protein. When gut bacteria is imbalanced, it will produce more TMAO on an ongoing basis. Dr. Angela Genoni, who lead the recent Australian study correlating the Paleo diet with increased TMAO, told Paleo Magazine that the TMAO in fish is not a concern. She’s worried about the chronic TMAO elevation resulting from the dysbiosis caused by a low-fiber diet.
The good news is that a Paleo diet is high in fibre, and advocates the consumption of ancestral foods like bone broth and fermented foods, all of which support a healthy microbiome. Therefore a Paleo diet should lower TMAO if practiced correctly 🙂
Podcasts
Social Connection – Ben Greenfield
Ben Greenfield took a break from crazy biohacking and longevity procedures to talk about a very important topic, social connection. Often times people who switch to a more ancestral lifestyle can find that they loose many of social connections they had before because their lifestyle no longer conforms to the social norm. It can often times be hard to find others with similar beliefs as you and this isolation can have a negative impact on your health. Remember, we were meant to live inside of a social group. Luckily the internet can foster some kind of social connection via social networks, but there is something to said about interacting face to face. We should all be making an effort to make in person connections with those around us. Sometimes it is worth it to put aside our ancestral practices and maybe do something we wouldn’t normally due for the sake of some quality social interaction.
YouTube
Collagen Timing – Mike Nelson
Collagen supplementation is great for supporting healthy hair, skin, and ligaments. I personally mix a scoop of collagen into my water everyday and make an effort to eat meat with the skin on and on the bone so I get as much collagen from my meat as possible. However, I never put much thought into timing of collagen. In the video above Mike not only explains the benefits of collagen but explains how collagen can help increase ligament strength and therefor help support muscle gain. In other words, the stronger the ligaments, the more load your muscles can handle, and the additional load can help build more muscle. The key is to take it 30-60 minutes before you exercise.
Yep, collagen / gelatin before training can help with soft tissue remodeling The catch is that you need to take it about 30 – 60 minutes BEFORE training. The main study (Shaw et al.) had 3 groups 1) placebo, 2) 5 grams and 3) 15 grams of gelatin. It turns out that the amino acid content of gelatin vs collagen and both will work as they are virtually identical.