- Newsletter Signature
- Wishing you the best,
- SHARE THIS LINK WITH YOUR FRIENDS
- Course Consolidation
- COURSES
- Female Sports Nutrition
- Going Slow to Go Fas
- Optimizing Nutrition with Smoothies
- Body Timing and Health
- Daily Performance Program
- Daily Performance - Introduction
- Daily Performance - Physical Activit
- Daily Performance - Stress & Resilience
- Fasting
- Fasting and Health
- Ideal Weight Program
- Adiposity and Weight Control
- The FLASH Diet
- Sleep and Weight Control
- Food Reward and Weight Control
- Food Environment and Weight Control
- HOW TO GUIDES
- How-to Guide - Indoor Air Quality
- How-to Guide - Ergogenic Aids (Athletic Enhancers)
- How-to Guide - Chrononutrition (Eating Timing)
- How-to Guide - Smart Daily Light
- How-to Guide - Mediterranean Diet
- How-to Guide - Smoothies
- How-to Guide - Overcoming Jetlag
Newsletter Signature
Wishing you the best,
SHARE THIS LINK WITH YOUR FRIENDS
Course Consolidation
Some of the old newsletters have a reference to the older courses. In these situation, I am replacing the old courses with the new one.
There have been three courses that we have consolidated:
- Mediterranean Diet
- We consolidated 3 Mediterranean diet courses:
- What Components Make the Mediterranean Diet Healthy
- courses into this one ↓ :
- Body Timing and Health
- We have have consolidated 4 circadian rhythm courses into this one course ↓:
- Fasting
- And we have consolidated 4 fasting courses into one ↓
Body Timing and Health
In this course, we explain how our internal clocks respond to light, and how the master clock synchronizes peripheral clocks in tissues throughout the body. He also describes the processes through which sleep is regulated, how clock genes interact with each other to govern our circadian function, why some of us are “larks” and some of us are “doves,” and much more. Tons of good info for those of you who want to take a deeper dive into the biology of circadian rhythms, but without having to invest a whole lot of time into the endeavor.
To that end, we would also encourage you to refer to our How-to Guides for Smart Daily Light and for Chrononutrition, so you can optimize your light exposure patterns and your food timing respectively for ideal circadian alignment.
Fasting and Health
Here, we highlight our course on fasting and health developed by Jeff Rothschild.
One of the biggest recent trends in nutrition has been intermittent fasting. And of course, there are new studies coming out all the time pointing to intriguing benefits for health, performance, and lifespan. But there are a few different styles of fasting - how do you determine which is best, in general and for you specifically?
In this course, Jeff explains the basic and clinical effects of fasting, plus different fasting protocols and how to implement them in a way that works for your own life. If you want to take a deeper dive into intermittent fasting, this is a great resource. We also suggest looking at our How-to Guide to Fasting if you’re seeking a quick reference sheet on the matter.
COURSES
Female Sports Nutrition
Of course, many aspects of sports nutrition are the same for both men and women, and plenty of people have done well just applying the same general guidelines across both genders. However, there are a few noteworthy differences, and better understanding of these unique considerations can lead to improved training and greater success in competition.
In this course, we cover female hormones, optimizing energy intake, specific micronutrients that are often a concern for female athletes, how to maintain optimal hydration, how to plan training at different points in the cycle, and how to avoid health issues associated with inadequate energy availability (female athlete triad). If you are a woman who trains regularly, or if you coach women/girls, this course should prove to be a useful resource for you.
Going Slow to Go Fas
This week, I’d like to highlight our course on polarized training, developed by Jeff Rothschild. Jeff is a sports dietitian, currently doing PhD research at the Auckland University of Technology in the Sports Performance Research Institute New Zealand (SPRINZ) research lab.
In this course, Jeff examines how manipulating aspects of exercise and diet can favorably influence adaptations to endurance training. Specifically, he reviews how increasing training volume and intensity influence the number and function of our mitochondria, and takes a look at the training strategies of elite marathoners and cross-country skiiers. At the end of the course, he puts it all together and explains how you can apply this science-based info to your own endurance train
Optimizing Nutrition with Smoothies
This week, we’d like to highlight our course on smoothies and phytochemicals. One thing to keep in mind, when talking about the impact of ultra-processed food, is that altering the structure of food isn’t necessarily a bad thing per se. In fact, certain forms of processing can actually enhance the health-promoting properties of whole foods in some cases. Smoothies are a great example. For instance, a recent study found that an apple and blueberry smoothie elicited a reduced glycemic response compared to an equal portion of whole apples and blueberries!
The course takes a deep dive into phytochemicals in plants, where they are found, their powerful health effects, and how intelligently-devised smoothies can help optimize our intake of these compounds. For more practical information on using smoothies to enhance nutrition, please refer to our How-to Guide for smoothies.
Body Timing and Health
In this course, we explain how our internal clocks respond to light, and how the master clock synchronizes peripheral clocks in tissues throughout the body. He also describes the processes through which sleep is regulated, how clock genes interact with each other to govern our circadian function, why some of us are “larks” and some of us are “doves,” and much more. Tons of good info for those of you who want to take a deeper dive into the biology of circadian rhythms, but without having to invest a whole lot of time into the endeavor.
To that end, we would also encourage you to refer to our How-to Guides for Smart Daily Light and for Chrononutrition, so you can optimize your light exposure patterns and your food timing respectively for ideal circadian alignment.
Daily Performance Program
Daily Performance - Introduction
Since we are talking about change and self-improvement, we’d like to highlight our Daily Performance course. This course, and indeed the entire program, is oriented around one question: Can you increase your cognitive performance and productivity by making relatively simple adjustments to how you approach your day and night? Of course, the answer to that question is an emphatic yes.
In this course, we address some of the unique challenges associated with modern work, like digital distractions. For instance, did you know that research shows that it takes on average almost a half hour to return to something that you were working on after being distracted, even if the distractor was something that only took like a minute of your time, like an email or text message? 🤦 That kind of thing consumes a ton of our time and mental energy, and in turn may lead to more stress, which takes an insidious toll on your long-term health. We also lay out how critical daily environmental and lifestyle inputs affect various dimensions of cognition - probably more than you realize. Fortunately, all of these are modifiable, at least to some extent. To learn more, check out the course, and the entire Daily Performance Program.
Daily Performance - Physical Activit
Sedentary behavior is clearly deleterious to your cardiovascular health, which is one reason why we recommend integrating movement breaks into your day. But emerging research also suggests that physical activity, including just standing and walking, may influence aspects of your cognitive performance. This is due, in part, to changes in blood flow to the brain, as well as through a long-term rise in levels of growth factors in the brain. Pretty cool!
In this course, we review:
🧠 Effects of exercise on the mind
💡 How physical activity within the day can improve your thinking
🏋️ Strategies to integrate more movement into your day
Daily Performance - Stress & Resilience
Nevertheless, it’s worth noting that stress isn’t a wholly bad thing. We now know that we actually need a certain amount of stress in order to be healthy and perform at our best, and indeed specific types of stressors (like exercise or polyphenols) appear to have health-promoting effects.
Thanks as always for reading! If you're looking for more juicy health studies (and occasionally random science or memes), be sure to check us out on Twitter on@humanOS_me
Fasting
Fasting and Health
Here, we highlight our course on fasting and health developed by Jeff Rothschild.
One of the biggest recent trends in nutrition has been intermittent fasting. And of course, there are new studies coming out all the time pointing to intriguing benefits for health, performance, and lifespan. But there are a few different styles of fasting - how do you determine which is best, in general and for you specifically?
In this course, Jeff explains the basic and clinical effects of fasting, plus different fasting protocols and how to implement them in a way that works for your own life. If you want to take a deeper dive into intermittent fasting, this is a great resource. We also suggest looking at our How-to Guide to Fasting if you’re seeking a quick reference sheet on the matter.
Ideal Weight Program
Adiposity and Weight Control
This week, we’d like to highlight one of the courses from the Ideal Weight Program - developed by our good friend Stephan Guyenet. Adiposity (from Latin adeps, meaning fat) is simply a scientific term for body fatness. According to the CDC, around 40% of Americans are classified as obese, and the situation isn’t rosy around the rest of the world either. The causes of obesity are pretty readily identified. And we are actually able to reliably reduce body fat - in the short term. But long term fat loss is extremely elusive. Why is that?
In this course, Stephan describes the various ways that adiposity is measured, and how we know that excess fatness contributes to poorer health. He also discusses different approaches to reducing body fat, and why the most common (and intuitive) way that people are apt to go about it is effective, but largely unsustainable. Finally, Stephan lays out a six-pronged plan for fat loss, so that your natural impulses are aligned with your goals, and you don’t have to rely upon willpower to achieve (and more importantly maintain) your ideal body mass. Check it out!
The FLASH Diet
This week, we’d like to highlight one of the courses from the Ideal Weight Program, developed by our good friend Stephan Guyenet, a researcher who specializes in the neuroscience of eating behavior and obesity. The Ideal Weight Program is an evidence-based system for sustainable weight management which teaches you the science of body weight regulation and eating behavior, and translates it into simple, practical strategies for weight management. This program offers three different diets based on your weight management goal. For those who need to lose body fat relatively rapidly (but safely), the FLASH Diet is the plan for you.
FLASH stands for Fat Loss And Sustainable Health, and is modeled after protein-sparing modified fast diets that were developed by researchers in the 1970s and remain the most effective fat loss plan ever studied. In this course, Stephan explains the background behind FLASH diet, where it fits in the sequence of the Ideal Weight Program, what to eat and how to prepare food to adhere to this plan, and more.
Sleep and Weight Control
This week, we’d like to highlight one of the courses from the Ideal Weight Program, developed by Stephan Guyenet. Much of the Ideal Weight Program is centered around nutrition, as you would expect, but research has shown that multiple aspects of our lifestyle play an important role in body weight. Sleep is one of the most important, and perhaps most underappreciated.
In this course, Stephan reviews the basics of sleep and circadian rhythms, then zooms in on how insufficient or misaligned sleep specifically influences body fatness. He looks at a few key studies that have examined the impact of altered sleep on food intake, which largely mirror the findings that we described above. But it actually gets even worse - sleep loss can also adversely affect nutrient partitioning, making it harder for you to hold onto muscle! Fortunately, this is for the most part a solvable problem. Stephan covers realistic ways for you to obtain restorative sleep, and hopefully achieve your body composition (and health) goals.
Food Reward and Weight Control
This week, we’d like to highlight another one of the courses from the Ideal Weight Program, developed by Stephan Guyenet. This course addresses a vexing problem that is more salient this time of year than perhaps any other: Why do we overeat, even when we know it’s bad for us, and even when we can see that it sabotages our long term goals?
What specific properties cause us to be so drawn to particular foods, like cookies and french fries, but not as much to others, like broccoli and lettuce? And what can we do about it?
In this course, Stephan explores the challenge of food reward, and how to manage it, so you can be successful in your health and body composition goals - whatever they may be.
Food Environment and Weight Control
This week, we’d like to highlight one of the courses from the Ideal Weight Program, developed by our good friend Stephan Guyenet.
What is the true cause of the obesity epidemic? This is an incredibly complicated and multi-factorial problem, but on a high level, it is thought to be the result of genetically/metabolically susceptible individuals living in an obesogenic environment and adopting an obesogenic lifestyle.
Logically, the most effective solution would be to alter the modifiable risk factors - meaning remove the obesogenic environment. However, this is obviously quite difficult to do on a national/global scale. Maybe impossible. But could you make some changes to your own food environment? (Of course, this week specifically might be a bit challenging!)
In this course, Stephan explains how our food environment has changed over time, why it is so crucial for body weight regulation, and highlights some science-based tips for how you can restructure your own food environment for optimal health over the long haul.
HOW TO GUIDES
How-to Guide - Indoor Air Quality
This week we’d like to highlight our How-to Guide to Indoor Air Quality Honestly, there isn’t a whole lot that you can do individually about outdoor air pollution other than stay inside when levels of pollutants are high (or move somewhere with cleaner air I guess?).
But as we have discussed previously, the indoor environment has its own perils. Indeed, the EPA has estimated that concentrations of certain recognized air pollutants can be 2-5 times higher in indoor environments than outdoors, due to compromised dilution capacity in enclosed spaces. And fortunately, indoor air is much more actionable.
In this How-to Guide, we identify the main types of indoor air pollutants and go over what you can do to mitigate or eliminate them, as well as some fact-checking on a very popular (but scientifically dubious) method for purifying indoor air.
How-to Guide - Ergogenic Aids (Athletic Enhancers)
An ergogenic aid is simply a supplement that enhances physical performance. Dietary intake of these substances can, in theory, affect training adaptations in a couple of different ways. They can achieve this by simply increasing the exercise stimulus from a single training bout - basically just enabling an athlete to train longer or harder, or reducing perceived exertion. But they may also be able to affect gains in endurance by altering cellular responses to exercise-induced stress.
Importantly, these changes in cell signaling may not be universally beneficial from the standpoint of adaptation. For example, it is theoretically possible that a supplement could simultaneously make it easier for an athlete to exercise hard, but also have effects on cellular signaling that actually have a long-term negative impact on the adaptive response to training.
In this guide, we review some of the most rigorously researched supplements (including LactiGo), discuss how best to use them, and talk about why some supplements that sound like a good idea may actually not be helpful at all. If you are looking for a quick reference sheet of the latest evidence-based guidance on supplements to maximize your performance and adaptations, check it out! 👀
How-to Guide - Chrononutrition (Eating Timing)
This week, we’d like to highlight our how-to guide for chrononutrition. We often fixate on what we are eating, when we are discussing diet and lifestyle, but we are gradually appreciating that when we eat also has a significant impact on our health and our daily performance.
This guide will help show you how to optimize your food timing, in alignment with the latest scientific research, to maintain robust circadian alignment and to ensure you are performing at your very best.
(PS: If you’re looking for a deeper dive into the subject of nutrient timing and other aspects of circadian physiology, please refer to our Circadian OS Program.)
How-to Guide - Smart Daily Light
This week, we’d like to highlight our How-to Guide for Smart Daily Light. We evolved in the presence of natural daily cycles of light and darkness. But obviously, the invention of artificial lighting means that we can now fully control when and how much light we’re exposed to, which has altered this relationship. Today, most of us spend the majority of the day indoors, under comparatively dim artificial lights. Then, after sundown, we are exposed to more bright light, and importantly more blue light due to our digital devices. Consequently, we are getting less bright light during the day and less darkness at night.
This is important because light sends crucial signals to the body, and the intensity and timing of this light matters for your health as well as your performance. But fortunately, there is a lot you can do about it. In this guide, we discuss how you can achieve a pattern of natural light and darkness in the modern world by adjusting behavior, modifying your indoor spaces, configuring your devices, and more.
How-to Guide - Mediterranean Diet
When we talk about the Mediterranean diet and what makes it healthy, we usually think of olive oil, red wine, and some other hallmarks of Greek/Italian cuisine. Interestingly, it has also been suggested that polyamines may also play a role in this association. The traditional Mediterranean diet happens to be quite rich in spermidine, containing 2-3 times as much as the standard American diet, and as the research described above suggests, spermidine seems to be pretty good for you.
In this reference sheet, we go over the fundamental principles of the Mediterranean diet, what components of the diet make it healthy, and what sorts of foods and beverages you should consume in order to achieve the best possible version of this dietary pattern based on the current scientific literature. Great if you’re looking for a basic, efficient guide to how to Mediterraneanize your eating habits. For a little bit of a deeper dive, you can refer to our Mediterranean Program, which delves into the background of the Mediterranean diet as well as the clinical research.
How-to Guide - Smoothies
This week, we’d like to highlight our How-to Guide for Smoothies. We know that consuming a nutrient-rich diet made up of fresh whole foods is key for performing at your very best, both physically and mentally, and maintaining a healthy weight. One efficient and convenient way to ensure that you’re making that happen on a daily basis is through smoothies. Incidentally, smoothies can also be a very convenient vehicle for powder supplements - I like to add my creatine and other stuff to the blender to make them easier to take.
But obviously not all smoothies are necessarily a smart choice from a nutritional standpoint, which is why we developed this science-based guide to constructing healthy smoothies. For a slightly deeper dive, please refer to our course on smoothies and phytochemicals.
How-to Guide - Overcoming Jetlag
As we progress into summertime and appear to be emerging from the worst of the pandemic (knock on wood), it seems like more and more people are getting out and traveling again. Consequently, a lot of us are probably going to be battling jet lag, perhaps for the first time in a while. Jet lag simply refers to a misalignment between the timing of your body clock and the timing of your environment. And until your body becomes re-synchronized to your new time zone, your physical and mental performance is apt to suffer. Is it possible to accelerate this adaptation?
Yes! That’s why we developed this guide, based on state-of-the-art research on circadian alignment. In this doc, we tell you how you can adjust to a new time zone faster, and even give you instructions on how to put together a simple DIY device to shift your body clock really fast (we call it Time Warp). You can also refer to our past interview with Stanford professor Jamie Zeitzer, an expert on jetlag who has done a ton of research on novel ways to adjust to transmeridian travel.