http://www.thealternativedaily.com/
Do you have “goosebumps” even when you’re not cold? Does your skin show tiny red spots that never go away? You may have keratosis pilaris. Keratosis pilaris affects nearly 50 to 80 percent of all adolescents and approximately 40 percent of adults. The areas that most commonly show symptoms include the upper arms (92 percent […]
Originally Posted At: https://breakingmuscle.com/feed/rss
Okay, guys, let’s take a second here and have a bit of a chat, will we?
When I say flexibility, what comes to mind? I bet the first thing that you think of is as strong as f**k, right? Not. That’s because when people think of flexibility, they think of little gymnasts folded in two just hanging out, or dancers in splits for what seems like forever.
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When planning a BBQ menu, the meat is usually the star, and the sides are an afterthought. With this Grilled Greek Summer Veggies recipe, a platter overflowing with colorful marinated and grilled vegetables steals the show.
This is the perfect vegetable side dish for summer. It’s very no-fuss, keeps well in the refrigerator to eat throughout the week, and can feed a crowd.
You’ll find that this recipe adapts well to small tweaks to suit your tastes. Here are a few ways to make it your own:
Here’s how to make your new favorite BBQ side dish.
Time in the kitchen: 20 minutes
Servings: 4
In a bowl, combine ¼ cup of Primal Kitchen Greek Dressing, Primal Kitchen Avocado Oil, garlic, salt and pepper. Toss all of the vegetables in the sauce. Allow the vegetables to marinate for 30 minutes, tossing them once or twice during this time.
Preheat your grill over medium heat. Once hot, carefully place the vegetables on the grill. After 1-2 minutes, turn each of them 90 degrees to get nice grill marks.
Grill for an additional 1-2 minutes, then flip over the vegetables and grill for an additional 2-3 minutes, or until they are nicely grilled on the outside and tender on the inside (this time will depend on how thick you slice them).
Drizzle the remaining Primal Kitchen Greek Dressing on top and garnish with chopped parsley and feta if desired.
Calories: 222
Fat: 18g
Total Carbs: 14g
Net Carbs: 9g
Protein: 4g
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The post Grilled Greek Summer Veggies Recipe appeared first on Mark’s Daily Apple.
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Life is so painful when you’re not feeling grounded. During these times of uncertainty, both socially and economically, feeling grounded can be difficult at best. So, what can you do to bring back the sense of peace in your life, and make yourself feel more balanced mentally and emotionally? How about focusing on whole foods […]
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Physical frailty predicts COVID-19 outcomes.
If you’re lifting, getting 1.62 grams of protein per kilogram of bodyweight is a nice target.
After new analysis, Ireland reduces its “excess deaths from coronavirus” numbers. Still 13% higher than normal, but lower than previous estimations.
Evidence for coronavirus presence in Brazil as early as November 2019.
Episode 431: Gina Devee: Host Elle Russ chats with author Gina Devee.
Primal Health Coach Radio, Episode 67: Laura and Erin chat with Jen James about heart-centered entrepreneurism.
Why dads need to roughhouse with their kids.
Is there another pandemic coming?
Those pesky PSCK9 inhibitors: so effective on paper, so useless (and sometimes deadly) in real life.
Some awesome ideas for games to play with your kids.
Don’t let this be you.
Science is humanity’s highest pursuit.
Got arthritis? Try barefoot.
I’m not surprised: Humans use smell to get around.
Interesting finding: Very low LDL is not associated with lower cardiovascular mortality. It is associated with higher all cause mortality.
It’s just everywhere these days: Plastic found in vegetables and fruits.
Another reason everyone should exercise: It improves the quality of breast milk.
A nice piece on importance of megafauna in human diets: How eating (and killing) the megafauna changed humans forever.
Did you roughhouse as a kid?
One year ago (Jun 28 – Jul 3)
“Plastic rain sounds like our version of lead pipes for the Romans.”
– We will see, Chris.
The post Weekly Link Love—Edition 88 appeared first on Mark’s Daily Apple.
http://www.thealternativedaily.com/
A little in your salad, a little in your foot bath! Apple cider vinegar’s long history as a natural remedy means that it has been used to treat everything from sore throats to obesity — and even the feet. Feet are particularly sensitive to their environment, making them susceptible to bacteria, fungi, calluses, and more. […]
http://www.marksdailyapple.com/
Who’s that person? Nope, it’s not me. Although health coaches are a great resource for helping you set goals, overcome obstacles, and get out of your own well-intentioned way. For the record, that person is also not your spouse, your roommate, your friends, or your kids.
The one person who can make you reach all your health goals is YOU.
I see you out there working hard, swapping your typical yogurt and banana breakfast for a protein-rich meal of eggs and bacon. I see you squeezing in a few sprint sessions a week and limiting blue light at night. You’re committed to doing everything right. Until, something goes wrong.
Tell me if any of these statements sound familiar.
“I’ll start over on Monday”
“I guess I’m not cut out for this”
“My husband/wife/kid keeps sabotaging me with sugary treats”
The thing is, there’s a big difference between people who think it would be really cool to reach their goals and those who unapologetically knock those goals out of the park. Trust me, I know this scenario firsthand. I’ve worked with hundreds of men and women with a desire for the latter, and a mindset for the former.
If you’re in that camp too, there is a solution. And it starts with having a deep-down belief that you have what it takes to show up for yourself each and every day and accomplish the tasks you set out to do, no matter what happens. This is what’s called self-efficacy.
According to Albert Bandura, the social psychologist responsible for this theory, self-efficacy refers to an individual’s belief in his or her capacity to execute the behaviors necessary to achieve specific results.1 In other words, if you really believe you’re capable of making a change, you’re more likely to actually make it.
Self-efficacy is also measured by how well you deal with temptation or situations that are triggers for you.You might want to lose fat, run a marathon, or kick your pint-of-ice-cream-a-night habit for good. But if you feel like you’re incapable of handling the commitment, the challenges, and the ups and downs that come with any health journey, you’re sabotaging yourself from the get-go. To get a sense of what I mean, take a look at these examples.
People with a strong sense of self-efficacy typically select more challenging goals and focus on opportunities, while people with low self-efficacy tend to fixate on obstacles. Take for instance, a study that looked at binge eating disorders in 1632 overweight men and women. Using data from a randomized clinical trial that compared a variety of weight loss interventions — including self-efficacy — the study found that having a negative emotional state was a high predictor of a poor treatment outcome. The worse the participants felt about themselves, the more obstacles they perceived, and the less weight they lost overall.2
So, how do you get more of it? According Bandura, your self-efficacy stems from four distinct sources, including:
Taking those sources into account, I created 8 strategies that allow you to improve self-efficacy by focusing on certain areas of your life that could use a boost. These are the same strategies I use with my own clients to help them believe they’re as insanely badass as they really are.
Even if you have a history of being told you don’t have the right stuff or you’ve struggled to master anything short of boiling water, you can start improving your self-efficacy right now by following these steps:
Let’s unpack these steps.
1. Start small. Choose goals that are easier to achieve. Rather than attempting to not touch another piece of bread for the rest of your life, say “I’m not eating bread today.” Need it to be even smaller? Try this on for size: “I’m not eating bread at this meal.” Smaller goals give you easy wins.
2. Get inspired. Know someone who’s totally crushing their goals? Show your support, ask them questions, and remember that if they can do it, you can too. While it can be hard to celebrate other people’s wins (especially if you’re having a tough time achieving yours), allow yourself to get inspired by their success.
3. Avoid comparison. If scrolling through your Instagram feed or chatting with your neighbor who dropped 4 dress sizes causes your self-confidence to plummet, don’t do it. Comparing yourself to others who are at different parts of their journey isn’t a good plan for anyone (see strategy #2).
4. Do the work. Be consistent with your healthy habits every day — even when you don’t want to. Sit down to an epic protein-forward meal or make movement part of your routine without expecting an immediate result. Some days will feel awesome, others won’t. Your job here is to continue to show up and put in the work.
5. Watch your self-talk. Be aware of how you talk to yourself when the going gets tough. If you constantly beat yourself up for giving up on your workouts, try turning that negative talk into something more neutral, without emotion like, “right now, I get really tired during my workouts.” It’s just a neutral awareness. For more tips on overcoming negative self-talk, read this.
6. Know your triggers. The deli with the awesome hoagie rolls? The bakery case at your grocery store? Backyard BBQs at your neighbor’s house? If certain places or situations test your ability to stay on track, avoid them for now. Or better yet, have a plan that allows you to be successful, like not going grocery shopping hungry or bringing your own Primally-friendly foods to the party.
7. Adopt an “I never lose” mindset. I’ve always loved the quote by Nelson Mandela, “I never lose. I either win or I learn.” Pretty powerful, right? This kind of mindset allows you to look for the opportunity in every situation. Instead of an all-or-nothing, win-or-lose mentality, it helps you see what you can learn – and what you can do differently next time if something didn’t go the way you’d anticipated.
8. Add up your successes. This is a key factor in building up your self-efficacy. Start keeping track of your wins, no matter how small you think they are. Grab a journal and write each one down. You’d be surprised how fast they add up.
The post Self-Efficacy: Reach Your Health Goals Every Time appeared first on Mark’s Daily Apple.
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You can’t change your genes. But you can program them.
The modern world presents a number of problems for our genes. The world we’ve constructed over the last 50 years is not the environment in which our genetic code evolved. Our genes don’t “expect” historically low magnesium levels in soil, spending all day indoors and all night staring into bright blue lights, earning your keep by sitting on your ass, getting your food delivered to your door, communicating with people primarily through strange scratchings that travel through the air. So when these novel environmental stimuli interact with our genetic code, we get disease and dysfunction.
The genes look bad viewed through a modern prism. They get “associated” with certain devastating health conditions. But really, if you were to restore the dietary, behavioral, and ambient environments under which those genes evolved, those genes wouldn’t look so bad anymore. They might even look great.
This is epigenetics: altering the programming language of your genes without altering the genes themselves.
Think of your genome as computer hardware. If you were to program your computer you wouldn’t be changing the hardware; you would be changing the software that tells the computer what to do. So just as we talk about reprogramming or programming a computer and don’t suggest that the hardware itself has changed we likewise can talk about reprogramming our genes without suggesting that the genes have changed.
Okay, so how does this play out in reality? Are there any good examples of epigenetics in humans?
One of the most striking cases of the environment altering gene expression was in an old study of a homogeneous population of Berbers from North Africa.1 Researchers studied desert nomads, mountain agrarians, and coastal urban residents. All were Berbers with low genetic variance. These people had very similar genetic patterns—were from the same basic genetic stock—but very different living situations.
The researchers analyzed the white blood cells of the group “to study the impact of the transition from traditional to urbanized lifestyles on the human immune system.” Berbers from urban environments had evidence of upregulated respiratory and immune genes, for example. Those same genes lay more “dormant” in nomadic and agrarian Berbers.
Overall, gene expression between the three groups varied by up to one-third based on geographic location and corresponding lifestyle. In their conclusion, the authors lay out the foundation of everything we talk about on this blog and in this space:
“Diseases due to genetic factors in urban populations may bear little resemblance to the impact of the same genetic factors in traditional societies.”
Did you get that?
“Bad genes” aren’t bad in traditional environments. The trick, of course, is figuring out what makes up the traditional environment and whether you can replicate it in the modern world.
Let’s look at a specific example: Tobacco.
Tobacco smoking “silences” the MTHFR gene via hypermethylation.2 Since MTHFR is the gene that constructs the proteins we use to activate thousands of other genes, suppressing MTHFR suppresses all those genes that rely on MTHFR-related proteins for activation. This disrupts numerous physiological systems and can set the stage for things like birth defects, cancer, and heart disease. It’s an epigenetic disaster, and it’s one reason why smoking increases the risk of so many different diseases.
Tobacco also induces hypermethylation (overactivation) of the GCLC gene which controls glutathione production. This causes a suppression of glutathione levels, an increase in oxidative stress, and initiation of COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease).3 GCLC is meant to deal with more moderate levels of toxins and irritants; these can actually have a beneficial hormetic effect that triggers higher levels of glutathione and less oxidative stress. In this case, tobacco represents a supranormal stimulus that turns a helpful gene harmful.
Or how about the genetics of obesity?
For the last decade, we’ve been inundated with the idea that obesity is caused by your genes. That some people are just destined to be be overweight. Sure enough, there are dozens of genes linked to an elevated risk of obesity and overweight.
Only genes can’t wholly explain the huge rise in obesity rates over the last hundred years because genes don’t change that fast. People used to be thin, and now they aren’t, and they have the same basic genetic profiles.
The real problem is that almost everyone in the western world exists in a shared food environment which is obesogenic. If you live in America, you’re awash in drive-thrus, Big Gulps, and inexpensive, delicious processed food that’s been engineered to interact with the pleasure centers in your brain. Most modern countries are in similar boats, and obesity rates are climbing across other nations as they adopt our food-ways and work habits. The genes aren’t changing (at least, not quick enough to account for the stats), the environment is changing.
Because the environment has changed for everyone, and most people never really question its obesogenic nature — they eat the pizza, they buy the processed food, they sit for eight hours a day at work and watch TV for four, they slog away on the treadmill—researchers looking for the genetic origins of obesity miss or discount the effect of environment. Almost everyone whose genetic data they’re examining is exposed to the same obesogenic food environment, and its ubiquity masks its effects. And because some people appear to have genetic profiles that protect them against obesity, researchers lay the blame at the feet of the genes.
The “epigenetics of obesity” is more accurate than the “genetics of obesity.”
Let’s see a few more examples.
Some people carry an “exercise non-responder” gene. by most counts, it’s 15% of the population. For these folks, doing standard “cardio” doesn’t do much. It may even impair insulin sensitivity, raise blood pressure, lower HDL, and leave cardiovascular fitness unchanged.4
If the idea of someone being an exercise “non-responder” sounds ridiculous and unbelievable, you’re right. It turns out that while regular cardio is neutral or even detrimental to this genetic profile, high-intensity training confers the normal benefits you’d expect from exercise5. I’d also guess that resistance training would work as well.
It’s not the genes that are faulty. It’s the (exercise) environment that’s faulty.
MTHFR mutations often impair folate absorption or conversion of folic acid into bioavailable folate, and they increase the requirements of others nutrients like choline and vitamin B12. In the modern food environment bereft of vegetation and nutrient-dense animal products, those mutations cause huge issues. In a traditional food environment full of vegetation and nutrient-dense animal products, or supplemental forms that mimic the active food forms, they aren’t as bad.
If you eat a lot of vegetables (a good source of folate), you weaken the link between MTHFR mutations and kidney cancer.6
If you have some of the common MTHFR mutations, you need to eat more dietary choline (eggs, liver).7 Doing so preserves methylation status.8
Your genes also affect fat metabolism. Some mutations in the FADS1 improve the ability of a person to elongate plant omega-3s into long-chained omega-3s like the fish fats EPA and DHA. In the context of a low-fish diet, they can still make the EPA and DHA they require to function as long as they eat some alpha-linolenic acid. This mutation is more common in populations with a long history of farming.
Another mutation impairs the ability of a person to elongate those plant fats into animal-type EPA and DHA; they need to eat a high-fish diet or supplement with fish oil to get the omega-3s their bodies need. That’s the boat I’m in—I fucntion best with a steady supply of long-chained omega-3s in my diet, probably because my recent ancestors ate a lot of seafood. This mutation is more common in populations with a shorter history of farming, or a longer history of reliance on seafood.
There are multiple future possible versions of you. It’s up to you to decide which version you will become. It’s up to you to make lifestyle choices that direct genes toward fat burning, muscle building, longevity and wellness, and away from fat storing, muscle wasting, disease and illness. The day-to-day choices we make—whether it’s what to pack for lunch, or hitting the snooze button and missing the gym, or even sneaking a cigarette break—don’t just impact us in the short-term (or even in ways that are immediately clear to us). That can make this scary, but it can also be empowering.
You can fix yourself. You can be better. Your genes can work better. Everyone, no matter how dire their circumstances or how “poor” the cards they were dealt were, can forge their own epigenetic destiny.
You can’t ignore the genes. They still matter. You have to figure out, of course, how your particular genes interact with diet, exercise, sleep, sun, nature, socializing, and every other lifestyle behavior. That’s the journey you’re on. That’s the journey we’re all on—it’s what this website and movement are about.
There’s a lot we don’t know about this topic. What if I don’t have a study I can refer to? What if I don’t sign up for a DNA analysis—am I out of luck?
Use your intuition when you don’t have a study or haven’t defined an epigenetic mechanism: Does it feel right? Does it feel wrong? Are you getting good results? How’s your energy? How’s your performance? Those subtle (or not-so-subtle) cues from our subconscious and direct feedback from our waking life are where true knowledge and wisdom lie. After all, your genes “want” you to do the right thing. If we’re cued into our subconscious and we’ve led a generally healthy way of life, we become more sensitive to those messages. Those flutters of doubt or little urges we get are the body’s way of telling us we’re headed for epigenetic ruin or success.
Listen to those, or at least consider and don’t ignore them.
This is what The Primal Blueprint, The Keto Reset Diet, The Primal Connection, and even Primal Endurance have all been about. It’s why the sub-title of my first book is “Reprogram Your Genes for Effortless Weight Loss, Vibrant Health and Boundless Energy”. And it’s what we talk about (either directly or indirectly) day-in and day-out here at Mark’s Daily Apple.
Now I’d love to hear from you. Do you have any questions about epigenetics? About how we can alter our genetic destiny through modifying our environments?
Leave them down below.
References
The post Epigenetics, or What I Mean by “Reprogram Your Genes” appeared first on Mark’s Daily Apple.
http://www.thealternativedaily.com/
Kefir is an ancient beverage made by fermenting milk with kefir grains, which produces a host of beneficial bacteria. It is thought to have originated in the North Caucasus mountains of eastern Europe and Asia, where shepherd nomads developed the recipe. The word kefir comes from the Turkish word ‘keif,’ which translates to a state […]
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