What men eat and drink may affect their babies’ health
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
This is not exactly accurate, because sperm cells are constantly re-created. It would be more accurate to say that some sort of epigenetic mechanism, that authors of the linked study admit they are not sure about, during the time of initial spermatogenesis can affect future spermatogenesis and therefore future generations.
The implications of epigenetic inheritance research, including regarding the fetal environment, are pretty shocking. Endocrine disrupting chemicals, drugs, smoking, and obesity can hurt your grandchildren.
There's got to be some adaptive function for all these things.
If some sort of signal is passed down the generations, I bet that mechanism was honed by natural selection, because it was probably useful, in the grand scheme of things, to do so.
That gives wide latitude for more subtle influences (e.g. attractiveness, desire to have children) to have a large impact.
I would not be surprised if this ultimately explains the global growth spurt that took place in the 20th century.
If, however, your exposure leads to mutations in a genetic region that affects sperm or eggs, your children may be perfectly fine except for their germ cells, which can lead to an issue in their children, your grandchildren.
"...showed that young men who smoked just before puberty produced sons who were more likely to be overweight, beginning in adolescence."
So I looked at the study. They "found" that fathers who began smoking at very young age produced sons (but not daughters) with a higher BMI at age 9 (but not at 7). Note the fine distinctions, all from a sample size of just 330 such fathers. This reeks of a Munchhausen Grid.
But it gets better: the difference is between a BMI of 17.23 and one of 18.15. What an enormous difference! And both values are considered underweight.
So, guys, better start smoking before you're ten years old, or you risk siring underweight sons!
This [1] is a tool from the CDC for measuring the BMI of children. For instance a 9 year old with a BMI of 22.5 (in the middle of the normal range for an adult) would be considered obese. A BMI of 17.6 (very underweight for an adult) would mean they're more overweight than 70% of other children their age, but it's still considered a healthy weight - just on the high side. By contrast dropping down just 1 BMI point (to 16.6) puts the child at the 55th percentile, meaning it's a perfectly average weight.
Nova did an episode a few years back on Epigenetics that gave a pretty good explanation of it.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA&list=PLqeYp3nxIY...
If you just want to stay in decent shape and be healthy it's not really that hard. Let me summarize it:
1. Don't eat processed food !!!!
2. Limit your portions to the size of a medium plate(don't stack it though)
3. Eat your green vegetables.
No need to count calories either, just split your plate in 3 roughly evenly sized slices:
1st should be protein(chicken breast, fish, eggs, low fat mozzarella or cottage cheese for example)
2nd should be starchy carbs(pasta, rice or potatoes for example)
3rd should be fibrous carbs(broccoli, spinach or bell peppers for example)
and lastly you can add a little healthy fats like a fist full of nuts, a slice of avocado or a few table spoons of olive oil(men need this healthy fat for testosterone production).
And you can play around with this like increasing the ratio of the starchy carb slice for breakfast/lunch for more energy during your evening workout and increase the ratio of the protein slice for dinner for better muscle recovery after your workout.
I've heard it as 1/3 protein, 1/3 carb, 1/3 fruit and veg.
The difference is between good fibrous carbs, the ones that are nutritious, filling and low on calories like most green vegetables including broccoli and spinach, and "bad" starchy carbs(note the commas) like potatoes, pasta or rice which are not very nutritious but are high in calories and sugars which our bodies need for energy.
Also a good idea to add couple fasted days a month.
I got a bloodwork done at my last medical appointment and it came back perfect. High good cholesterol, low bad cholesterol, all the fats, proteins, etc. in the best ranges. The doctor then proceeded to go over all the things I must be doing right to have such good bloodworks but the only things I was actually doing were not ingesting too much sugar and exercising a lot. On everything else my diet basically consisted of the opposite of what is recommended.
Did the bloodwork include vitamin tests? If so, do you mind me asking what vitamins they tested for and how they came out?
I'm also a solid believer in adding fasting cycles, reducing meal frequency etc.
This has become all but meaningless as what it means to be processed varies so much and has come to include almost anything. You mention pasta, yet many definitions include flour as being processed. I've seen it go so far as defining anything with salt added as processed (even by you right before you eat it).
What is a reasonable definition of processed food that you can actually use when shopping?
So it does include flour and pasta?
Edit: olive oil and butter would also seem to fit the bill.
Olive oil is hugely controversial. Don't expect an answer on that.
Processing foods tends to remove the stuff which is good for you. That's why "whole" grain is advocated. You would do even better to selectively eat the wheat germ! So let me make the controversial but empirically true statement that it's possible to make a food more healthy by processing it. The reason processed foods are bad is because of our taste bud and business incentives.
That's why it's extremely problematic to focus on food processing, as opposed to an underlying nutrient understanding. The first thing that goes when we process foods is the fiber, and this is missing nutrient number 1 in the American diet.
As long we lack an ability to talk about the truly root issues with diet, reducing processed foods will do nothing (given sufficient time). Companies will figure out a way to call something unprocessed, but still give the same bad composition of nutrients.
And there's always the anti-fat faction. It's also a high calorie-density food. Like many of these topics, some people will argue that calorie density is irrelevant, but other people will disagree with them.
One of the problem with processed food is that it allows large quantities, which often means lower quality. Also, you don't see what it's actually being made of.
For example, in the olives article, it cited an instance of sub-standard, damaged olives being used to make olive oil
Yes, it does.
>Edit: olive oil and butter would also seem to fit the bill.
Indeed they would, unless you're making them yourself, or at least have an inkling of how, where, and by whom they were made.
Sauces are the enemy!
Occasionally eating something that comes in that form is okay - so making pasta from a once a week won’t kill you ( at least not quick enough to matter). But if you find yourself opening a box or bag of something every night, you may want to think harder.
Just my opinion, of course.
Eat food. Mostly vegetables. Not too much
(in which "eat food" means 'real' food, not processed food)
> 3rd should be fibrous carbs(broccoli, spinach or bell peppers for example)
Two thirds of what you recommend eating is carbs, no need to count calories, protein at dinner for muscle growth?
This is just a pile of very bad pseudoscience.
Additionally, a lot of plants require processing to be safe to eat, and many more are healthier if processed in some way. “Processed” is too generic to really mean anything.
Similarly ... How much exercise and what kinds? There's plenty of people who hurt or even kill themselves by doing the wrong kind of exercise, or overdoing it. Serious long distance runners, for example, die younger than more moderate exercisers, and they have terrible knee, foot, and hip problems past middle age.
An anecdote. I have a friend who used to walk everywhere in the city. They were always overweight but healthy. Flash forward to several years later. They are in the thick of a PhD program. The last couple years they have gained considerable weight. Lots of inactivity (sitting in a room all day) coupled with lack of sleep and not the best eating habits. And I recently learned that they have trouble walking, say, a parking lot distance. And their knees will start to hurt on a scale of 6 on a 10 scale if they do too much walking.
Too little exercise if accompanied by other less healthy life actions (sleep deprivation, less healthy diet) can rob you of one thing you might take for granted: mobility or the ability to walk across a long parking lot without strain.
There is no one size fits all recipe for how much physical activity. Your health is ultimately your responsibility.
https://samharris.org/podcasts/what-should-we-eat/
Re: exercise, I think it's clearly been established that the positive effects outweigh the negative ones. A few people may be killed cycling to work, but overall it's better for your personal health to cycle to work than to drive.
An extreme interpretation of any sport becomes difficult for your health, this does not include running 5-10Km distances.
Another example is low-fat diets. These are now known to not be as healthy as purported, and indeed for men, it is known that such a thing would actually lower testosterone, so maybe it's not just simply a matter of putting into motion the abstract ideal of 'treating yourself well', but actually a matter of offering targeted, specific advice.
We should not substitute 'common sense' with actual, careful study.
On top of scientific inertia, another issue is that "actual, careful study" often fails to detect things that are really there. A great example of this is scurvy. Scurvy at one time was one of the most virulent diseases there was. It killed many millions of people during the age of sail alone and long-term voyages simply accepted the reality that they would likely lose a significant portion of their crew to scurvy. [2]
We now know that scurvy is simply caused by a lack of vitamin C, but one problem with resolving the scurvy mystery over time is that the actual cure sounds absurdly hokey and superstitious. Oh you're dying from this absolutely awful disease that's causing your entire body to deteriorate and rot from the inside out? Here, suck on some limes - it'll cure you! And scientific trials to test the "lemon theory" (which had been written about for hundreds of years) failed to show any meaningful success. The reason is that exposing lime juice to light, air, and certain metals used in storage/delivery (all as happened during experimentation) worked to greatly reduce its vitamin c content.
It was also confounded by the fact that fresh meat also has lots of vitamin C. So you notice claims that fresh fruits seem to cure scurvy and fresh meats also seem to cure scurvy. This now led to the scientific view that the problem was caused by tainted food. So forth and so on, stumbling very awkwardly along again until we reached an era of technology where we could isolate and measure 'vitamin C' and finally prove, once and for all, it was indeed the root cause. As a fun aside, vitamin C was not initially named ascorbic acid. It was named hexuronic acid. It was renamed to antiscorbutic (against scurvy) acid, shortened to ascorbic, once it's effect was proven once and for all. This is also where the slang of a limey for a British sailor came from. They were one of the first nations to require a regular dosing of lime for their sailors.
So there's always a balance in life. It's important for the evolution of our entire species that not everybody believe the exact same thing. Common sense is usually right, but sometimes it's very wrong. And science is usually right, but sometimes it's very wrong. People diverging from the norm to pursue their own views and values is something that benefits everybody as they work as completely volunteer guinea pigs. And it's often the case both that common sense ends up complimenting science, as well as science complimenting common sense.
Epigenetics is a thing and you need to be aware of it. And if you intend to conceive, you are doing your kid a disservice by not being in peak physical condition when you do so.
80% mother 20% father
Just prescribing "don't do X vices" ignores the fact many people turn to vices to deal with shitty situations. I wish school had been better constructed so I wasn't stressed out at that time.
A lot of the times mental health, especially sleep quality, is more important as it will affect your physical health as well.
Because if you are serious about improving people's lives, you must meet them where they are, not where you imagine they ought to be. To use another analogy, being a moral scold is dealing with the world as 'oughts' when the world is a series of 'is'.
By another analogy, if you had a child who was having a problem with some vice, if you were to merely periodically send them a letter or mini-lecture pointing out they ought not to do the thing, you would be open to accusations that you did not do your best to help them.
Now obviously on the internet you cannot just reach into everyone's lives, but carrying about with overly broad rhetoric leaves everyone with the sense that after hitting 'reply' one sat back self satisfied they had made the world better by their words.
So let me reup: food is complex, and anyone who says that eating healthy is easy is wrong. They might find eating healthy is easy for them, but empirically they're so obviously wrong - if it were easy to eat healthy, then there would be no type 2 diabetes.
I'm sure plenty would still disregard the message, but it adds a new facet.
The reason for this is that it’s incredibly hard to make meaningful studies over such long periods of time where so many other variables have an impact on health.
And now someone claims that they can trace some health aspects back over one or more generations? I call BS.
Not that this isn’t possible, but that such specific claims like higher BMI can be traced back to smoking fathers.
(This might be a writing prompt)
Maybe a guy takes caffeine because he's stressed about his financial security and can't sleep well, and the caffeine prevents him later from sleeping well at night propagating a vicious circle => worse babies.
The beer keeps you a chilled parent, and the coffee keeps you awake and keeps you alert after the beer and lack of sleep.
Plus coffee water has been boiled, and beer isnt a good habitat for nasties, and neither is jerky, so food poisoning should be much reduced.
My father started smoking when he was 7 y.o. (yes, seven, lol). I was born when he was 36. I'm almost 33 right now and have never been overweight in my entire life. Not even a little ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.