Fitness Thread

[Speaker to Animals]

I take all these studies with a grain of salt. They have told me so much misinformation over the years. Eat Margerine not Butter, fat will kill you, meat is bad for you, be a vegan, eggs are bad, eggs are good.

You guys have not seen academia from the inside like I did. Most science these days is a fucking farce. They are like cargo cultists carrying out patterns of behavior they perceive as bringing the cargo gods' favor and making the "science" happen. Very few people with doctorates these days have any idea of what they are doing. A lot of them still have a good understanding of science already done, how systems work, etc. But actually conducting valid experiments.. LOL, no.

Imagine for a moment a 17 year old high school girl writing a paper to prove some weird thesis she chose. She pours through all the books and whatnot looking for anything that supports it, ignoring anything that refutes it, and writes the paper without acknowledging that there exists reason to doubt the thesis. Now juice that up with some slightly difficult math that she doesn't really understand, but she plugs in her numbers in the equation, and add in a fair amount of tweaking the raw data to make it fit the thesis she already knows has to be correct, and there you have the typical writer of a research paper.


When I tell you people we are -- right the fuck now -- in a dark age, I am fucking serious.

[C-Mag]

I believe you man, just look at the Climate Science farce.

[Speaker to Animals]

That said...

I looked up the principal researcher and she looks legit to me. My suspicion (which will follow later) of what she actually found is based on (1) she is not accounting for muscle mass and only looking at bmi scores; (2) she is looking at people 70s and older.

Because of those two things, it's very likely she is narrowly focusing on the effect of having plenty of stored energy (fat) when people typically come down with a bad case of cancer or some other major illness. The really bad cancers tend to happen when people are older. We already know that being overweight actually increases your chances of surviving a bout of cancer. So by starting at age 70, she skipped past the horrific effects of being obese (since most fat people already died before they were 70 and the fat 70-year-olds she is studying are the few who survived or gained weight later in life), and then caught people at a time when cancer is most likely to occur and being fat is actually a benefit. But if you look at an actually fit man in his seventies, he can still carry a fair amount of muscle mass, which provides an even better chance of survival from cancer. Just having muscle or fat is a huge benefit if you are fighting through chemo. She has to somehow factor this effect out of her data. I see no indication that she did so, but the media doesn't report science very well.

I would want to know that she is not confounding this variable, but I have no access to her paper, will not pay for it.

[SuburbanFarmer]

Let’s just be clear that we are talking about the “social sciences”, and not actual science.

[Speaker to Animals]

Let’s just be clear that we are talking about the “social sciences”, and not actual science.

Nah. She's a legit neuroscientist. I just think if the news stories accurately relate her paper (doubtful), then she confounded variables.

The stories indicate that her samples begin at age 70. She is not accounting for the massive fatality rate of being fat leading up to that age (again if the news stories are to be taken at face value). By the time you get beyond your seventies, if you are a fatty and you still survived, then you already became the exception, and beyond that your being fat will confer a higher chance of surviving the cancers that most often afflict people in that age range.

But so is being relatively muscular. Your best route through old age, in my humble opinion, is building a modest base of muscle with bodyweight training styles, and maintaining that for as long as possible. Do enough cardio that your heart and vascular system is healthy the whole time. I think it's okay to put on a little bit of fat after 70, personally, but you don't need it if you have muscles.

[C-Mag]

That said...

I looked up the principal researcher and she looks legit to me. My suspicion (which will follow later) of what she actually found is based on (1) she is not accounting for muscle mass and only looking at bmi scores; (2) she is looking at people 70s and older.

+1
Good comments.

I often wonder if we really understand the human body all that much. I have meandering thoughts and questions on the subject. Do we really know how much muscle mass or how big humans can get in a healthy fashion with good nutrition and exercise throughout a lifetime?

Most humans over time have been relatively calorie starved or got through periods of forced fasting. Having ready access to calories and good knowledge about them is pretty new to humans.

We don't understand how people really process calories. What makes one person stay lean throughout their lives regardless of the types of calories they take in, or how another person with the same diet and activity get a spare tire.

We still have a lot to learn. It's easy to explain away as genetics, but that does us as much good as God made us that way.

[Speaker to Animals]

That said...

I looked up the principal researcher and she looks legit to me. My suspicion (which will follow later) of what she actually found is based on (1) she is not accounting for muscle mass and only looking at bmi scores; (2) she is looking at people 70s and older.

+1
Good comments.

I often wonder if we really understand the human body all that much. I have meandering thoughts and questions on the subject. Do we really know how much muscle mass or how big humans can get in a healthy fashion with good nutrition and exercise throughout a lifetime?

Most humans over time have been relatively calorie starved or got through periods of forced fasting. Having ready access to calories and good knowledge about them is pretty new to humans.

We don't understand how people really process calories. What makes one person stay lean throughout their lives regardless of the types of calories they take in, or how another person with the same diet and activity get a spare tire.

We still have a lot to learn. It's easy to explain away as genetics, but that does us as much good as God made us that way.

Guys like Jack Lalanne showed the potential.



He was a health and strength-training nut from an early age. Did everything right all the way to the finish line. He was swimming across the San Francisco Bay, towing boats behind him in his seventies.

[C-Mag]

Old Jack was pretty awesome. But...……………. the average NFL player in Jacks day was around 200 lbs and ran a 6 second 40. Today, the average size is 250 lbs and they run a sub 5 second 40. The Washington Redskins 'Hogs' that blocked for John Riggins in the early mid 80s only average around 260 lbs and were considered big. Now, if your NFL line isn't over 300 lbs you are small.

[Speaker to Animals]

Old Jack was pretty awesome. But...……………. the average NFL player in Jacks day was around 200 lbs and ran a 6 second 40. Today, the average size is 250 lbs and they run a sub 5 second 40. The Washington Redskins 'Hogs' that blocked for John Riggins in the early mid 80s only average around 260 lbs and were considered big. Now, if your NFL line isn't over 300 lbs you are small.

Most of that is fat, though.

[C-Mag]

Maybe that even more amazing. Because these guys are fast too.

I just wonder what are the upper limits, are we genetically changing now? In another 30 years will the average size of lineman be 7 foot tall and 400 lbs. We don't know. It seems unlikely, but I'd guess people in the 70s didn't think we see the speed and size we see out of these athletes today.