Garden Grocer Food for Thought

Skechers USA, via Business Wire The settlement includes Skechers Shape-ups.

People who bought a pair of Skechers toning shoes may not get the great legs and abdominal muscles that the advertisements promise – but now at least they can get their money back.

Federal regulators announced on Wednesday that Skechers has agreed to pay $40 million to settle complaints that the company deceived consumers with claims that its sneakers — from the Shape-ups, Resistance Runner, Toners and Tone-ups lines, endorsed by celebrities like Kim Kardashian and Brooke Burke — could deliver toned legs, better buttocks and a slimmer body “without setting a foot in a gym.” Skechers is now the second maker of toning shoes that the Federal Trade Commission has forced to reimburse consumers for making implausible claims. In September, Reebok agreed to pay $25 million in consumer refunds for making false claims about its EasyTone line of sneakers.

In announcing the settlement, the Federal Trade Commission said that Skechers had particularly overreached in its advertisements by making claims that its shoes, which retailed for $60 to $100 a pair, could even help people shed pounds.

“Skechers’ unfounded claims went beyond stronger and more toned muscles,” said David Vladeck, director of the trade commission’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. “The F.T.C.’s message, for Skechers and other national advertisers, is to shape up your substantiation or tone down your claims.”

A spokeswoman for the commission declined to say whether it was pursuing legal action against other makers of toning shoes, like Fila and New Balance. But the announcement spells more trouble for a once-flourishing industry that is now struggling with plummeting sales.

Toning shoes were once the fastest-growing segment of the athletic shoe market, with sales skyrocketing from $50 million in 2008 to a peak of $1.1 billion in 2010. Last year sales were sliced in half, dropping to $550 million, said Matt Powell, an analyst at SportsOneSource. Skechers held the lion’s share of the market, at 49 percent.

Skechers, for its part, said in a statement that it stands by its products. The company denied making false claims and suggested that the settlement was a business decision that would help it avoid costly battles in court. The company has been fighting class-action lawsuits about the toning claims as well as cases brought by various attorneys general.

“While we vigorously deny the allegations made in these legal proceedings and looked forward to vindicating these claims in court, Skechers could not ignore the exorbitant cost and endless distraction of several years spent defending multiple lawsuits in multiple courts across the country,” said David Weinberg, the company’s chief financial officer. “This settlement will dispose once and for all of the regulatory and class-action proceedings.”

Unlike regular athletic shoes, toning shoes have a rocker-shaped sole, which according to their makers creates instability that forces muscles to work harder, making them stronger. But a 2010 study financed by the American Council on Exercise looked at three different types of toning shoes, including Shape-ups, and found that they had no increased effect on muscle activation and calorie burn compared with regular athletic shoes. Skechers and other makers of toning shoes have also been hit with lawsuits by people who say that wearing the shoes caused falls and various injuries, like broken bones and hip problems.

Under the terms of the settlement, Skechers is still allowed to sell its toning shoes and make fitness claims about them, albeit less dubious ones. The company plans to continue selling its toning shoes, said its president, Michael Greenberg, and can still say in advertisements that wearing its toning shoes can lead to “increased leg muscle activation, increased calorie burn, improved posture and reduced back pain.”

The trade commission, however, said that the company is permitted to make such claims from now on only if they are true and backed by scientific evidence.

According to Skechers, the science behind toning shoes has been substantiated by at least 19 published studies and supported by researchers from around the world. But the trade commission said much of the evidence was bogus or deliberately misrepresented. One Skechers advertisement carried an endorsement from a chiropractor, Steven Gautreau, who said he conducted an independent study that found that Shape-ups were superior to regular athletic shoes.

“After performing a six-week clinical trial testing the benefits of Skechers Shape-ups, I am confident in recommending them to patients to increase their low back endurance and improve gluteal strength,” he said in the ad. “Patients also benefited from weight loss and improved body composition.”

According to the trade commission, however, Skechers failed to disclose that Dr. Gautreau is married to a Skechers marketing executive, that he was paid to carry out the research, and that his study did not produce the findings that he promoted in the ad. The trade commission said in court documents that Dr. Gautreau conducted two of the four studies that Skechers claimed were independent. Another Skechers ad said its Resistance Runner shoes could raise muscle activation by 68 percent in the calves, 71 percent in the buttocks and 85 percent in “posture-related muscles.” The trade commission said Skechers “cherry-picked results and failed to substantiate” those claims.

Consumers who have bought a pair of Skechers since 2008 can go to skecherssettlement.com to see if they are eligible for a refund.

Article source: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/16/skechers-toning-shoe-customers-to-get-refund/

Alex di Suvero for The New York Times Researchers have no definitive answers on whether  athletes who started competing later in life fare better than those who began competitive sports early.

I used to run with a guy who was unhappy with the way his performance had deteriorated over the years. In his early 20s, he said, he had been super-fast. A couple of decades later and about 20 pounds heavier, he had lost that amazing speed.

“Too many miles on the tires,” he would say. His idea was that if you start racing when you are young, you will be worse in middle age than if you started fresh when you were older.

But is it true, and if so, how does it happen? Do athletes accumulate injuries, for example, or just get mentally fatigued after competing nonstop for decades?

Personal Best

Gina Kolata on exercise.

There are no definitive data on this question, but there are some suggestive findings, said Dr. Vonda Wright, an orthopedic surgeon and exercise researcher at the University of Pittsburgh.

Dr. Wright’s study of senior Olympians — athletes age 50 and older who participated in the National Senior Olympic Games, a track and field event — found what she considers a surprisingly small rate of decline in performance until age 75: just a few percent a year in their times. After that, though, the athletes slowed down considerably.

She asked the athletes when they began participating in sports. In her survey, 95 percent said they were active in sports when they were teenagers and 85 percent said they were active as young adults.

But the survey did not ask what sports they played when they were younger — the same sports or different ones from those they were competing in now — or when they began to compete (it is likely that many of the women, growing up before Title IX, did not compete when they were young). Both factors bear on whether late-blooming athletes have an advantage as they get older.

Hirofumi Tanaka, an exercise researcher at the University of Texas at Austin, has some data that bear on the question, albeit obliquely. He and his colleagues measured the maximum oxygen consumption, or VO2 max, of 153 men ages 20 to 75. Because VO2 max describes how much oxygen can get to muscles during exercise, it is measure of how well a person can perform. Sixty-four of the men in his study were sedentary, and 89 were trained endurance athletes.

The results were something of a surprise. The endurance athletes had a greater VO2 max than sedentary men of the same age, but this measure also declined more swiftly with age among the athletes. And although Dr. Wright may be right that each year performance times decline only a few percent, that steady decline year after year takes its toll.

In their 20s and 30s, the endurance athletes could run 10 kilometers, or 6.2 miles, in about 36 minutes. In their 40s they were almost as fast — 38 minutes. But in their 50s, the men averaged about 44 minutes. Those older than 60 took about 53 minutes to run that distance.

If sedentary men suddenly took up an endurance sport, could they match or even surpass the longtime athletes? Without years of cumulative injuries, the inevitable price of any long-term and rigorous exercise program, might the newer athletes have the edge?

“This is a good question that nobody has addressed in the past,” Dr. Tanaka said. But, he added, there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that older elite athletes often were not athletes when they were young.

Kozo Haraguchi, a former world record holder in the 100-meter sprint, ran it in 22.04 seconds when he was 95 years old. Mr. Haraguchi broke his own record two months later, with a time of 21.69 seconds. Yet this astonishing sprinter did not even start jogging until he was 65. He did not start sprinting until he was 76.

“Most of the masters distance runners who compete at a high level are also slow starters,” Dr. Tanaka said. In his study of endurance athletes and sedentary men, the average age at which the distance runners who were older than 60 had taken up the sport was around 40.

But might this simply reflect the fact that so many longtime athletes retire when they are still young, before they stop winning races, leaving the field to novices? If elite athletes like the swimmer Dara Torres, 45, and the marathoner Joan Benoit Samuelson, 55, choose to stay in the game, to continue to train hard and compete, then maybe it will turn out that long years of competition hold a big advantage for older athletes.

Or maybe not.

At this point, Dr. Tanaka said, “nobody has the answer.”

Article source: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/14/can-runners-have-too-many-miles-on-the-tires/

Getty Images

During pregnancy, many women are pampered and cared for more than at any other time of their lives. Husbands are attentive, family members call to see how the mom-to-be is feeling, and friends host baby showers, lavishing a woman with gifts and attention.

Michael Stravato

But what happens after the baby arrives? Suddenly, pampering of the mother stops and attention shifts to the needs of the baby. The new mother, though physically drained from the rigors of childbirth, gets to work caring not only for her newborn but for others in the household as well.

It doesn’t have to be that way, explains Claudia Kolker in her new book, “The Immigrant Advantage: What We Can Learn From Newcomers to America About Health, Happiness and Hope.” This is not a book about immigration — although it should be mandatory reading for lawmakers debating immigration policy. Instead, it’s a book about best practices and the traditions that immigrants bring with them to this country that could benefit the rest of us.

“I am a convert,” writes Ms. Kolker, a contributing editor to The Houston Chronicle whose reporting career took her to El Salvador, Cuba, Haiti and India, among other places. “Many of these practices are so elegant and efficient at reaching American goals, I believe newcomers need to hang on to them. And the rest of us should consider trying them out for ourselves.”

I recently spoke with Ms. Kolker about the lessons we can learn from immigrants, why hot chocolate is good for new mothers and an ancient pampering ritual called the cuarentena. Here’s our conversation.

Most of us associate immigration with hardship. Why is your book called “The Immigrant Advantage”?

My book is about the really smart practices that first-generation immigrants do that help them achieve goals that Americans like myself really want — healthier moms, school success, thrift, the ability to save on a tight budget, how to finance a house or a Ph.D. on a modest budget. Things all of us would really like. These are practices that originated in other countries that translate particularly well in this country.

What do we know about the health of immigrants?

There is something called the immigrant paradox that actually shows an immigrant advantage in terms of longevity, infant health, mental health. There are certain elements to the immigrant profile that are very healthy. In many markers, first-generation immigrants tend to be healthier than native-born Americans.

It’s a paradox. Nobody has fully explained it, but the consensus is that self-selection has a lot to do with it. You’re not going to leave your country and everything you know if you have poor health and don’t have confidence you can make your way in the world. There is an attitude that seems typical of immigrants who leave everything they know because they want to improve their family’s life. And right now we are grappling with a lot of health challenges that are connected to our affluence. Immigrants come from places where they don’t have these advantages, and paradoxically, they don’t have some of the health problems we have.

Tell me about this unique practice of mothering the mother that is common among immigrants.

It’s called the cuarentena. It sounds like “quarantine,” but it refers to 40 days. In traditional Hispanic culture, as well as many cultures around the world, there is a real ritual attached to the first 40 days or so after a woman has a baby. We attach a lot of ritual to the time before the baby, with baby showers and foods to eat or not to eat during pregnancy and coddling the mother. We don’t really have a prescription for after a baby is born.

But in Mexican culture, it’s highly ritualized. The idea is that women family members traditionally surround a mother and help bathe and clean and diaper the baby. But really the focus of the attention is the well-being and safety and health of the mother for 40 days. The poorer and more rural and more remote a community is, the more likely it is that they are going to take this ritual seriously.

Is it a challenge for immigrants to duplicate the experience in this country?

There is no way to duplicate it because you don’t have the family structure or even the architecture. In a Chiapas village in Mexico, you are required to have an aromatherapy sauna at least twice during the 40 days. There are stone structures on the sides of mountains where you go for your ritual sauna. It makes a mom feel pretty good. There is a woman in the community who is a traditional postpartum massage therapist. You can’t recreate all these things, but what they try hard to do is recreate the intensive care, the idea that the new mother is as vulnerable in many ways as a newborn baby.

Can you describe what happens during a cuarentena in this country?

In my book I write about spending time in Akron, Ohio, with first-generation laborers from Chiapas. They don’t have an extended family of mothers and sisters. What I found in Akron, which does not happen in Mexico, is that it was men who were taking care of their wives. They were insistent that their wives observe the cuarentena as best they could manage. The women were not allowed to touch a dish or sweep the floor. There was a man who had never touched a broom before. In some cases, they would drive their wives crazy because they didn’t really know how to clean a house. But that was the level of investment in a new mother that they have.

What are some of the foods given to women during the cuarentena?

There are very prescribed rituals and foods. If there is chicken, she gets chicken soup. She is given hot chocolate – they have this whole system of certain foods that are cold and not suitable for a postpartum mom. You want to keep her body warm and her system warm. Foods like cucumbers are considered inappropriate for a recovering mother. There are emotions that are considered hot and cold that you need to protect her from. Anger is a cold, frosty emotion, and you need to protect a mother from feeling it or witnessing it.

One food is atole, a comfort drink made from toasted corn and thickened with milk and sugar. It has a lot of symbolic meaning because this is a culture that has revered corn as a divine gift. It’s very good for you. The iron in it is easily absorbed. But it also takes a lot of care to cook it. You have to cook it slowly and reheat it, and every time you give it to someone, you need to reheat it, add water and stir. What I found was that it really seemed to be about the amount of attention and love and engagement with the mother’s well-being.

What else happens during the cuarentena?

The mother is supposed to rest. She only has two jobs. One is to cuddle and enjoy her baby. The other is to learn how to breast-feed from experts. Nobody says “wing it” or “nature will take its course.’’ People will help you. There are no expectations that this is easy or spontaneous.

Does this mothering of the mother happen around the world?

There is a version of the cuarentena in many, many cultures. The length of time can vary. Chinese women lounge in seclusion for 30 days, while the Onitsha women of Nigeria rest for three months. From South Asia to the Philippines, the Middle East to South America, new mothers and their babies rest for 40 days.

Why is it 40 days?

The number 40 has a lot of mystical significance throughout history. There is a lot of biology attached. It takes about 40 days for your reproductive organs to return to their ordinary shape after having a baby. There is an observation about how the human body works and the cycle of nature, and I believe a lot of the folklore follows that.

Is there a take-home message from all the stories you collected for your book?

One of the things I learned is this idea of permission — permission to take care of yourself, to ask for help. This felt very revolutionary to me. It also entails giving help — stepping up and being there and not just sending an e-mail or gift basket, with the understanding that you will be helped in the same way. It’s the power of a group of people getting together at their best to do difficult things. With a cuarentena, you’re not alone. It’s difficult being a new mother. To be surrounded, to have other people on the team, it’s a happy atmosphere. It helps you get through it.

Article source: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/11/how-to-mother-a-mother/

Joe Paull/The Ledger-Enquirer, via Associated Press New research has found that younger athletes and those who are female show more symptoms and take longer to recover from a concussion than athletes who are male or older.

During a soccer game two years ago, Megan Wirtz, a goalie for her high school team, was bending down to pick up a ball when an opposing player mistakenly kicked her in the face.

Her face swollen and bleeding, Megan was taken to an emergency room and stitched up. No one realized she had suffered a severe concussion until three weeks later, when a player ran into her during another game and she fell to the ground, suffering a seizure on the field. Doctors believe she experienced what’s known as second impact syndrome, a sequence of events in which a child or teenager sustains a hit before a concussion fully heals, which can cause the brain to bleed or swell, even if the second impact is a moderate one.

“In retrospect, we hadn’t thought as much about her brain as we clearly should have,” said her mother, Barbara Wirtz, a nurse in East Lansing, Mich. “She doesn’t have lingering problems like some players do. We were very lucky in that regard. But the reality is if she continues to play, it could happen again.”

New research in the latest issue of The American Journal of Sports Medicine shows that athletes like Megan may be particularly susceptible to the damaging effects of a concussion. The research found that younger athletes and those who are female show more symptoms and take longer to recover from a concussion than athletes who are male or older.

More than 1.6 million Americans suffer a sports-related concussion every year, and a growing number occur among high school and college athletes. According to federal statistics, more than 150,000 teenage athletes sustained concussions on the playing field from 2001 to 2005, though that figure accounts for only those who were taken to emergency rooms, so the true number, experts say, is likely to be much higher.

While researchers have known that girls run a greater risk of suffering concussions than boys playing the same sports, the new study is among the first to look at the effect of both age and sex on a range of symptoms.

The findings suggest that because of anatomical differences that make them more vulnerable, female athletes, and younger athletes in particular, may need to be managed more cautiously after a concussion, said Tracey Covassin, an associate professor of kinesiology at Michigan State University and the lead author of the report.

“Parents need to understand that if their daughter has a concussion, that they may potentially take longer to recover from that concussion than their son who is a football player,” she said.

Over the course of two years, Dr. Covassin and her colleagues followed a large group of high school and college athletes from California, Michigan, Louisiana and Tennessee. At the start of the study, the athletes were given baseline tests that looked at memory and other cognitive skills. Those who suffered concussions in the two years that followed, about 300 in all, were given three different postconcussion tests commonly used in professional sports.

Over all, after concussions, the high school athletes performed comparatively worse for their age than older college athletes on measures of verbal and visual memory, and female athletes reported more symptoms and showed greater declines in visual memory compared with their male counterparts. The cognitive impairments were also more likely to persist over time in younger athletes, lasting an average of 10 to 21 days after concussion in high school students. That is about two to three times as long as the five- to seven-day period of persistent symptoms that has been documented in college athletes.

Researchers say that younger athletes may be at greater risk of damage from concussion because their brains are not fully developed. There is also some evidence that young women may suffer more symptoms than young men because of higher estrogen levels, which may exacerbate brain injury, as well as greater rates of blood flow and higher metabolic needs in the brain, which may make symptoms more pronounced. But, says Mark Hyman, author of “Until It Hurts: America’s Obsession With Youth Sports and How It Harms Our Kids” (Beacon Press, 2009), girls may also just be more willing than boys to admit to injury and seek treatment.

“We don’t expect girls to be indestructible, as we do boys,” who may be more likely to play through pain to avoid being sidelined in their sport, he said. “Attitudes are changing about that. But not fast enough.”

The findings also highlight the dangers of treating children and teenagers as “miniature adults,” he added. “The brain and head of a small child are disproportionately large for the rest of the body,” he said. “The result is that their heads are not as steady on their shoulders. When they take a big hit in a football game or are slammed with an elbow in a soccer game, their brains move inside their skulls. That’s when concussions occur.”

As for Megan, she continues to play soccer, but under strict rules. Her parents attend every game, and are more alert to potential problems.

“I think we’re better at assessing the symptoms of a concussion now,” Ms. Wirtz said. “We’re a little more watchful and demanding that coaches don’t keep her in if there’s any question at all that she got knocked around.”

Article source: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/10/concussions-may-be-more-severe-in-girls-and-young-athletes/

Heather Ainsworth for The New York Times A vending machine that sells baby carrots in a high school in Manlius, N.Y.

Five years after California started cracking down on junk food in school cafeterias, a new report shows that high school students there consume fewer calories and less fat and sugar at school than students in other states.

The findings suggest that state policies can be successful to some extent in influencing the eating habits of teenagers. The study found that California high school students consumed on average nearly 160 calories fewer per day than students in other states, the equivalent of cutting out a small bag of potato chips. That difference came largely from reduced calorie consumption at school, and there was no evidence that students were compensating for their limited access to junk food at school by eating more at home.

While a hundred calories here or there may not sound like much, childhood obesity rates have more than tripled in the United States in the last four decades, and many researchers say that most children and adolescents could avoid significant long-term weight gain by cutting out just 100 to 200 extra calories a day.

“I would definitely say that 158 calories is significant,” said Daniel R. Taber, an author of the study and a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “When you combine this study with other studies on California law, the body of evidence suggests the schools in California really have made healthier changes by getting rid of things like sweets and candy bars.”

California is one of several states that have sought to reduce childhood obesity by targeting junk food in schools. A decade ago it became the first state to ban the sale of soft drinks in grade schools, and it later enacted a similar ban in high schools. Since 2007, the state has also enforced nutrition standards for “competitive foods” in schools, the snacks and foods that are not included in meal plans but that students can get on school grounds — from vending machines, for example. California law limits the amount of fat, sugar and calories that can be found in these foods.

To study the effect of this policy, the researchers examined data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on the eating habits of high school students in California, comparing it with data on students from 14 states that did not have nutrition standards for vending machine snacks and other foods sold outside of school lunches and other meal plans. Over all, 680 students were included in the study, which was financed by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and published in Archives of Pediatrics Adolescent Medicine.

California students had the lowest daily intake of calories, fat and, especially, added sugars. And it seemed clear that their eating behaviors at school played a large role. California students got a lower proportion of their daily calories from school foods than students in other states: about 21.5 percent, compared with 28.4 percent among students elsewhere.

The reductions in fat, sugar and calorie consumption among Hispanic students “are particularly encouraging given the high prevalence of youth obesity among Hispanic individuals in California and the United States over all,” the authors wrote. “It is also encouraging in light of research that documented the high presence of convenience stores, mobile food vendors and other food outlets surrounding schools in Hispanic communities.”

Still, California’s students had not suddenly become health nuts. They were still eating junk food — just slightly less of it than their peers in other states. And their vitamin and mineral intake was similar to that of students in other parts of the country.

“Students may not be buying as many candy bars at school, but that doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily eating salads instead,” Dr. Taber said, noting that schools still offer items like baked chips and desserts that comply with the regulations but offer little in the way of nutrition.

He said that schools could take an additional step by replacing some of the junk food being filtered out with healthy options like fruits, vegetables and whole grains. Iowa, for example, began requiring in 2010 that at least half of the foods available outside meal plans contain whole grains. Other than that, no state has laws that require whole, unprocessed or fresh foods to be available outside of school lunches for high school students.

School initiatives could also focus on students’ eating behaviors at home, Dr. Taber said.
“We have to recognize that school-based laws have a limited scope because students only consume about 25 percent of their calories at school,” he said. “No one vector or environment is going to be the magical cure. Obesity is a very complex problem with many answers, so we really need to target different aspects of students’ environments.”

Article source: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/08/bans-on-school-junk-food-pay-off-in-california/

Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times Mussel Pizza

Mussels are a delicious and sustainable way to get your heart-healthy omega-3 fatty acids, writes Martha Rose Shulman in this week’s Recipes for Health.

I always associated high omega-3 content with fatty cold-water fish like salmon, mackerel and tuna, but it turns out that there are 1,472 milligrams of omega-3s in 6 ounces of mussels (the approximate amount of meat you get from a pound in the shell), only 400 milligrams less than the same amount of salmon.

Farmed mussels are a much more ocean-friendly seafood choice than farmed salmon…. Look for mussels that are shiny and black, and somewhat heavy for their size. When you get them home, take them out of the wrapping immediately, give them a quick rinse and put them in a big bowl. Cover the bowl with a damp cloth and refrigerate until you’re ready to clean and cook them.

Here Ms. Shulman gives us five new ways to cook mussels.

Oven-Roasted Mussels With Fresh Spinach: Mussels don’t have to be steamed. They will pop open in a hot, dry cast iron skillet, on a grill or in the oven.

Spicy Spanish Mussels: Inspired by a tapas bar in Valencia, this dish is made special by the crunchy almond and hazelnut picada added after the mussels are steamed.

Mussel Risotto: Brown rice can be added for a mixed-grains risotto.

Curry-Laced Moules à la Marinière With Fresh Peas: These are classic wine-steamed mussels, but the broth is seasoned with a little curry powder.

Mussel Pizza: A dish typical of seaside towns in Italy or the south of France.

Article source: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/04/adding-mussel-to-your-meal/

Russell Thurston Gretchen Reynolds

For more than a decade, Gretchen Reynolds has been writing about the science of health and fitness. Her weekly column, Phys Ed, is one of the paper’s most popular features, regularly appearing on top of the “Most E-mailed” list. Now Ms. Reynolds has distilled the knowledge gained from years of fitness reporting into a new book, “The First 20 Minutes: Surprising Science Reveals How We Can Exercise Better, Train Smarter, Live Longer,’’ published last month.

Phys Ed

Gretchen Reynolds on the science of fitness.

While the subtitle alone makes bold promises about the potential of exercise to protect the human body, the most surprising message from Ms. Reynolds is not that we all need to exercise more — or at least not the way exercise is typically defined by the American public. Ms. Reynolds makes a clear distinction between the amount of exercise we do to improve sports performance and the amount of exercise that leads to better health. To achieve the latter, she explains, we don’t need to run marathons, sweat it out on exercise bikes or measure our peak oxygen uptake. We just need to do something.

“Humans,” she writes, “are born to stroll.”

I recently spoke with Ms. Reynolds about the science of exercise, why standing up is good for you and why, after writing a book about fitness, she began to exercise less. Here’s our conversation.

Why did you choose “The First 20 Minutes” for the title of a fitness book?

The first 20 minutes of moving around, if someone has been really sedentary, provide most of the health benefits. You get prolonged life, reduced disease risk — all of those things come in in the first 20 minutes of being active.

Without being evangelical, I wanted people to understand that this is a book about how little exercise you can do in order to get lots and lots of health benefits. Two-thirds of Americans get no exercise at all. If one of those people gets up and moves around for 20 minutes, they are going to get a huge number of health benefits, and everything beyond that 20 minutes is, to some degree, gravy.

That doesn’t mean I’m suggesting people should not exercise more if they want to. You can always do more. But the science shows that if you just do anything, even stand in place 20 minutes, you will be healthier.

Is part of the problem that people equate exercise with trying to lose weight, and many of them have given up?

I think a lot of people look to exercise to help them lose weight, and when they don’t lose weight immediately with exercise, they quit. They return to the couch, and they basically never move again. What is lost in that is that fitness is almost certainly more important than fatness.

If you are overweight but fit, meaning you have a reasonably good V0₁2 max (a measure of oxygen uptake), then your risk of premature death, all the chronic diseases — diabetes, heart disease, cancer — will drop. If you have to choose, choose to be fit, whether you lose weight or not.

If someone starts an exercise program and improves his fitness, even if he doesn’t lose an ounce, he will generally have a longer life and a much healthier life. It would be nice if people would look at exercise as a way to make themselves feel better and live longer and not necessarily as a way to make themselves skinnier.

In researching this book, what did you find are the biggest misconceptions about exercise?

One of the biggest misconceptions is that exercise has to be hard, that exercise means marathon running or riding your bike for three hours or doing something really strenuous. That’s untrue and, I think, discourages a lot of people from exercising. If you walk, your body registers that as motion, and you get all sorts of physiological changes that result in better health. Gardening counts as exercise. What would be nice would be for people to identify with the whole idea of moving more as opposed to quote “exercise.”

A regular theme of your column is the risks of being sedentary. What’s more important to health: exercise or sedentary behavior?

It’s also an important theme in the book. There are two things going on: One is activity, and the other is inactivity, and they have different effects on the body. There is a whole scientific discipline called inactivity physiology that looks at what happens if you just sit still for hours at a time. If the big muscles in your legs don’t contract for hours on end, then you get physiological changes in your body that exercise won’t necessarily undo. Exercise causes one set of changes in your body, and being completely sedentary causes another.

Has writing this book changed your own approach to fitness?

It validated some of the things I was already doing, like not stretching before a workout, which I always hated doing. I hated sit-ups and found out they were bad for your back. I was pleased to learn that. It has changed how I approach hydration in exercise. Now I drink when I’m thirsty, and it seems to be completely fine.

I also exercise a whole lot less. Partly it’s because I have less time, but it’s also because I have learned that I don’t have to do more to be healthy. My main goal now is not to be competitive. What I really want is to be healthy and to set a good example for my son. I want to be around for the next 40 years, and the science seems to show very clearly that you don’t have to do a lot to make yourself a whole lot healthier.

I run a couple of miles most days. I used to feel like if I didn’t run five miles it didn’t count. Now I’m very content to get out for half an hour or 20 minutes, and I feel reasonably healthy after that.

And you told me that you also stand more?

I really do stand up at least every 20 minutes now, because I was spending five or six hours unmoving in my chair. The science is really clear that that is very unhealthy, and that it promotes all sorts of disease. All you have to do to ameliorate that is to stand up. You don’t even have to move. I’m standing up right now as I talk on the phone. I stand during most of my interviews now.

I’m finding this very inspirational. What is your advice for people reading this — what should they go do today?

If people want to be healthier and prolong their life span, all they really need to do is go for a walk. It’s the single easiest thing anyone can do. There are some people who honestly can’t walk, so I would say to those people to try to go to the local Y.M.C.A. and swim.

There are always options for moving. You don’t have to do anything that hurts. You don’t have to buy equipment. If you have a pair of shoes, they don’t even have to be sneakers. People have gotten the idea that exercise has to be complicated, and that they need a heart rate monitor, and a coach, and equipment and special instruction. They don’t.

The human body is a really excellent coach. If you listen to it, it will tell you if you’re going hard enough, if you’re going too hard. If it starts to hurt, then you back off. It should just feel good, because we really are built to move, and not moving is so unnatural. Just move, because it really can be so easy, and it really can change your life.

Article source: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/04/the-surprising-shortcut-to-better-health/

Paul Conrath/Getty Images

Is it wise to practice weight training and aerobic exercise on the same day?

That issue is surprisingly contentious in the sports world. Many competitive athletes, their coaches and athletic trainers have come to believe that aerobic exercise, if practiced in close proximity to strength training, reduces the ability of muscles to strengthen and grow. Conversely, many contend that weight training performed on the same day as aerobic exercise blunts the endurance training response.

This phenomenon, known variously as “muscle interference” or “exercise antagonism,” is a frequent topic on fitness-related chat boards. But to date, most of the discussions have been based on anecdotal evidence or simple conjecture. There has been little science supporting or challenging the existence of interference.

Phys Ed

Gretchen Reynolds on the science of fitness.

So, independently, groups of researchers at McMaster University in Ontario and the Karolinska Institute and other institutions in Sweden recently recruited volunteers to test the idea that you get more physiological benefit from performing only one type of exercise on any given day.

The two groups of scientists rounded up very different subjects. In Sweden, the volunteers were healthy and active young men, primarily college students who regularly worked out but didn’t necessarily compete.

The Canadian volunteers were sedentary, middle-aged men who hadn’t exercised much, if at all, in the past year. (No women took part in either study, an omission that is common and frustrating in exercise science.)

The exercise protocols were also different, in interesting ways. In Sweden, the men began by pedaling a stationary bicycle for 45 minutes, using only one leg, an action that supplied the aerobic component of the experiment. Six hours later, they completed a series of strenuous leg extension exercises using both legs.

Essentially, in each participant one leg had undergone combined exercise, featuring both endurance and resistance training on the same day, while the other leg had done endurance training alone.

The scientists took muscle biopsies before and after each session.

For their part, the Canadian researchers had their older volunteers finish three separate trials. In one, the men rode a stationary bicycle for 40 minutes at a moderate pace. On another day, the same volunteers sweated through eight relatively strenuous sets of leg extension exercises. In the final session, the men completed four sets of leg extensions and then rode the bicycle for 20 minutes, finishing half as much of each type of exercise, but in rapid succession.

The scientists biopsied the men’s leg muscles before and after each session.

“Our hypothesis had been that we would see a greater response to each exercise individually,” says Stuart Phillips, a professor of kinesiology at McMaster who oversaw the Canadian study. Specifically, he says, the scientists had expected that endurance training on its own would significantly affect portions of the muscle cell related to energy production, while resistance training would increase protein synthesis within muscles, the first step toward enlarging the muscles.

Combined training, the Canadian scientists had hypothesized, would dampen at least one of the molecular changes; physiologically, one of the responses would predominate and interfere with the other.

That didn’t happen.

Instead, after combined training, the men’s muscles displayed the same amount of change within both cellular pathways as after either type of exercise on its own, even though the men had actually completed only half as much of each.

“We saw no indications of interference,” says Dr. Phillips, whose study was published last month in The Journal of Applied Physiology.

The Swedish investigators arrived at a similar result. Their study, published in March in Medicine Science in Sports Exercise, showed little difference in the genetic and biomechanical responses within muscles whether the men performed both aerobic and resistance training or aerobic training alone.

In other words, “aerobic exercise can precede resistance exercise on the same day without compromising” muscle building, the scientists conclude.

And if you prefer your weight training first, the Canadian study scheduled the resistance work before the bike riding, without compromising the results for either type of exercise.

Of course, both studies looked only at immediate results. But Dr. Phillips believes that over the long term, the effects should be the same. “There’s no reason to assume that interference only kicks in later in training,” he said. If it existed, he continues, it presumably would show up in the earliest molecular changes inside muscles, and it did not.

These findings are important for serious competitive athletes who are designing serious, complicated training regimens. But they also have implications for those of us who’ve been, until now, ignorant of the possible existence of exercise antagonism. We can, it seems, remain blissfully unconcerned.

“It appears that you can set up a workout regimen that happens to be convenient for you,” in terms of how and when you shuffle the endurance and resistance elements, says Dr. Phillips, “and you’re not going to get less training response.”

Best of all, Dr. Phillips’s study suggests that you can potentially do less of each form of exercise when you combine them and still gain considerable benefits. “In our study, the men were doing only 50 percent as much” cycling and weight training in the combined session as during the specialized workouts, he points out. “But their muscles couldn’t tell the difference.”

Gretchen Reynolds is the author of “The First 20 Minutes: Surprising Science Reveals How We Can Exercise Better, Train Smarter, Live Longer” (Hudson Street Press, 2012).

Article source: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/02/mixing-weight-training-and-aerobics/