Posted on 04/18/2018 8:01:54 PM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
You hit the fast food drive-through a couple times a week, and your grocery cart is regularly filled with cookies, packaged doughnuts, ice cream, chips (and dip). But you’re thin. You run—a lot—and you’re not gaining any weight, so all’s good, right? Well, not exactly. Put down the chocolate cupcake and hear us out.
While runners do tend to be much healthier than the general population, with lower rates of diabetes and heart disease, that’s largely due to a healthy diet rather than running regularly, says Sara Mahoney, Ph.D., chair of the department of exercise science at Bellarmine University. In general, because runners run, they take care of their bodies by also eating well and resting.
But not all of them. Some of them—and we all know one—subsist on doughnuts and burgers. In the short term, running can mitigate the negative health effects of that lifestyle. But over decades, exercise loses its protective abilities.
Longtime Boston Marathon director Dave McGillivray, 63, learned this the hard way. McGillivray, who’s run the Boston course every year since 1973, logged 90 to 120 miles a week in his heyday, and every year on his birthday he runs his age in miles.
Four years ago, however, McGillivray began feeling short of breath at the start of workouts. An angiogram revealed he had severe coronary artery disease. “Wait a minute,” McGillivray said. “I’ve been running all my life. I’ve done eight Ironman Triathlons and 140 marathons. I’ve run across the United States. How can I have blocked arteries?”
McGillivray has a family history of chronic cardiac illness, and he had also been eating like a teenager for most of his life. “As a runner, I just felt that if the furnace was hot enough, it would burn whatever you put in,” he says. “So I would eat anything and everything I wanted.”
That attitude is not uncommon among runners. Half of the Runner’s World Twitter followers who responded to a poll said they eat whatever they want because they run and don’t gain weight. Those numbers align with a recent survey of recreational ultrarunners, which found that 62 percent do not follow the American College of Sports Medicine’s recommendations for nutrition, despite being aware of them.
But just because the number on the scale seems healthy doesn’t mean your diet isn’t doing damage on the inside. “Time and time again, I meet runners in their 50s and 60s, who think they’ve done pretty much everything right in their life from a health perspective, who end up with heart disease. When I talk to them about their diets, they are often quite shocking,” says McGillivray’s physician, Aaron Baggish, M.D., director of the Cardiovascular Performance Program at Massachusetts General Hospital Heart Center and associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.
While diet is one of the most important components of health among athletes, it is also one of the least understood, due to lack of clinical trials, says Baggish. Still, he points to overindulgence in simple sugars as “the single most common dietary transgression among any endurance athletes, but specifically runners.” He’s calling out white bread, white pasta, white rice, and refined sugars. “Eat large portions of these, and the body turns them into bad molecules, bad types of fat, bad oxidative sugar species—things that do a lot of damage to the heart vessels,” Baggish explains.
Still, runners often hear mixed messages about how exercise—particularly high-intensity sessions—can erase the ills of a junk-food habit. A recent study by Christian Duval, Ph.D., a researcher in the department of exercise science at the Université du Québec à Montréal, provides the case in point: Duval fed a small group of men between the ages of 18 and 30 breakfast sandwiches, burgers, fries, dessert, and soft drinks for every meal of the day for two weeks. The subjects ate nary a vegetable, and they were consuming “an enormous amount of saturated fat, a very large amount of sugar, which is even worse than fat, and chemicals found in processed food,” says Duval. But thanks to an additional prescription of interval training, Duval’s subjects didn’t gain weight. What’s more, when he tested their blood for fat buildup and inflammatory processes—main drivers of heart disease, cancer, and other chronic diseases—it didn’t seem like the diet had any effect.
But this study, which was widely reported, was over the course of weeks, not years. The damage from a bad diet can take far longer to register. Take atherosclerosis, a disease that Baggish says festers over many years. “It’s a process that starts when we’re young, and it gradually accelerates over time. People don’t feel symptoms until the disease is already quite pronounced and progressed.”
Bottom line: You can’t outrun bad eating habits. As Baggish puts it, “Even if you exercise like a fiend, if you do other things that are unhealthy, the poor diet choices will catch up with you.”
It’s good stuff!
Strange, you do not look Jewish or Islamist.......
I’m a runner. I follow a ketogenic diet, I do intermittent fasting, and I run/workout on an empty stomach in a fasted state. Never felt better.
If everyone ate healthy all the time, all restaurants would go out of business except for sea food, veggie & Indian restaurants.
Yep. Control sugar and sodium and it goes a long way.....at least in my case it did.
There is so much sugar AND sodium hidden in foods these days, reading the labels is a must. Cap’n crunch cereal for instance has an exorbitant amount of both.
Sugar,Sugar and mo’ Sugar.
Good genes are tough to beat.
My grandma lived to be 106 and ate an “average” diet, smoked an average numbers of cigarettes, drank an average amount of liquor.
Her exercise in her last thirty years was primarily turning over cards in canasta games.
The only distinctive thing about her life—she never worked a day in her life—very low stress.
So I say stop worrying about food, stop worrying about exercise, and get the stress out of your life!
That’s actually not accurate. At an average of 400 calories per hour of slow jog (4 mi/hr) that is 8,000 calories—or about 2 1/3 pounds.
About 28 pounds in a year.
Eat right, exercise daily, die anyway!
I do high intensity workouts regularly. My diet is not nearly what it should be - okay, it’s bad. But really, I’m at that point that I try to do everything in moderation and live life to enjoy it. While I do take of myself, when I go is not really up to me.
Vegetarians are typically the most unhealthy people. You can be a vegetarian and eat healthy but it’s not easy on a vegetarian diet to get all the nutrients your body needs.
I see what you did there. :-)
I think a “bowel” of pork is called a chitterling or a chitlin’. Not sure what a bowel of lentils would be called.
Been trying to eat better getting rid of Carbs, White bread and sweets since Jan 1, 2018. Got back into running. have dropped 25lbs feel better.
Avg 4 miles a day running/walking
I was 265 not at 239 want to get down to about 220.
My age works against me since I am 58.
I actually subscribe to Running magazine and find their content top notch. I read this article on Monday.
Genetics means far more to arteries than diet. Honest doctors tell their patients this. (I have a GREAT doctor!) You can eat cardboard and water and still have high cholesterol.
Honest doctors will also tell their patients about heart scans. It’s an MRI that will give you an image of your arteries and if they have any blockage.
I have 240 Cholesterol. Always have since I was a teenager. However, a recent heart scan shows no blockages whatsoever. No need for statins and their negative side-effects since a high cholesterol hasn’t resulted in blockages.
Cost for a heart scan: $99 and 15 minutes total time. The results are immediately provided. I did mine at South Denver Cardiology. Wife did too. No blockages in her arteries. Best piece of mind.
“If everyone ate healthy all the time, all restaurants would go out of business except for sea food, veggie & Indian restaurants.”
Baloney. There are good foods to be found in all cuisines. Indian joints are terrible food, loaded with fatty starches.
“Eat Right Stay Fit Die Anyway”
Yepper. It’s sort of a cult or religion with some, I think, loosely tied with the 7 stages of grief. As I recall, one part of that is the “bargaining” stage.
So there are people who think that by sacrificing and eating sawdust and grain, foregoing all meats, dairy, carbs, no smoking, no drinking, running 12 miles a day, they’ll live forever. Maybe they will live longer, maybe not.
It is true that with the public demanding cradle to grave subsidization by government the government will take an inordinate interest in their diet and exercise. Sort of like when I was in the Army. We had to run several miles a day, we were weighed regularly. Overweight individuals were definitely “fat shamed” I’m here to tell you. We thought it was hilarious, and frankly, so did the fat people when you get right down to it.
I had no idea someone could lose so much body fat in 8 weeks. The Army wrote the book on that shit. I recall at the obstacle course, a really fat guy, Private Waters, was halfway across a hand over hand rope deal. It was pretty high off the ground. He wasn’t going to make it. The Senior Drill sergeant quickly assessed the situation, and immediately exclaimed “I’ll ketch ya! I’ll ketch ya! I’ll ketch ya!” LOL!! Some things just sound better with a southern accent, not sure why but it’s true.
Anyway, Pvt. Waters let go, and Senior Drill stood aside. PLOP!! Nothing hurt except his pride. All that fat provides cushion, you see. By the end of training, Waters was lean and mean - and needed a new set of uniforms. He had a newfound confidence that was evident as well.
As an aside, MANY of the “social engineering” programming techniques foisted on the young these days are obviously perversions and 180° retreats from the good physical and character training techniques discovered from military type training going back probably thousands of years. Everytime we figure out what works, the leftists use the knowledge to twist it around.
I just lost a lot of weight this year by old fashioned calorie counting.
It means you just have to eat less of whatever you are eating, and try to eat veggies if you have to snack.
You probably burn about 2100 calories a day or so—if you can keep your intake down to 1700 or so—you lose a pound (3500 calories) every nine days, three pounds a month and very low stress.
Fungi transgress all borders.
Ran a 10K this past weekend. At the finish line they had donuts, ice cream bars, cold chocolate milk and other yummy delights. At the Rock n Roll marathon they handed out cold beers at the finish line - at 10am. If I had to eat healthy, what would be the point of running?
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