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While we’ve been off enjoying the splendors of mosquitoes, quaint cabins, and a beautiful lake in Southern Oregon, I managed to find a few really interesting articles that you might be interested in:
From the NYT–body size may be an unreliable indicator of health.
From CNN.com–coming soon to a drugstore near you…Exercise in a pill?
From Time.com–Where you put on your extra weight may help determine which type of dieting will work better for you.
And a funny one from the NYT–”Flawed Logic in Obesity Forecast”. My favorite rebuttal using the same logic…At the current rate of population growth on Earth, there will some day be more people on Earth than molecules in the universe. Ha!
More on Monday about how I tried to exercise while camping with the family.
J.D.
1 response so far ↓
1 Peter // Aug 24, 2008 at 2:58 pm
Hey Mac,
Interesting reading, but stay skeptical. The media usually gets these things wrong. Actually problems arise all the way along the research chain. Studies on different diets are very hard because subjects tend to underestimate the number of calories they consume. So unless you lock up a group of people for say a year and track their every move, you’re dealing with bias. Second, even if results aren’t all that spectacular, some researchers like to cherry-pick their data and present it in a way that supports their hypothesis. An example is the often touted HIIT training study that claimed HIIT burned 9 times more fat than steady state cardio. When you look at the actual results, it turned out even the HIIT group only burned 1 pound, while the steady state cardio group burned 0.1. Sure HIIT DID burn 9 times more, but it’s more of a “small numbers, large percentages”-thing. The difference could easily be attributed to diet. Finally, news outlets love to sensationalize stories! Usually reporters aren’t experts on nutritional science, so they may misinterpret a study and/or exaggerate the claims.
So if you see another article that interests you, I encourage you to go the source and look up the original papers.
As for the exercise in a pill story (again, there’s a lot more to fitness than this pill would provide and what about side effects?) But purely philosophical, I actually like the effort it takes to get fit. Kind of like the journey being more important than the destination. To me, meeting challenges that I previously thought to be impossible, fills me with a feeling of self confidence. It builds character. That’s gotta be worth something!
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