medman

Not that I'm going to defend American militarism, but to say America has participated in "almost every war" suggests to me that you're not very familiar with global politics. The number of wars going on at any given moment in Africa alone is astounding. The Americans have their fingers in many pies, and while they have been involved in at least one war at almost any given moment in the past several decades, there's a lot more going on in the world than that. And yes, they may often have tangential connections through weapons sales and economic support, but I assume by "participate" that you mean directly.

This is all great advice! I look forward to incorporating full squats into my leg workout once race season is done! A quick question for the veterans on here - how does your typical full squat weight compare to the weight you would use for parallel squats (with an equal number of reps)?

My supervisor and I were discussing this. He was saying the exact same thing - that he's probably a bit brighter than he lets on. I agree. I mean, you can tell that the man really can't think on his feet - but I think he's not as completely useless as he seems.

The only regret I have about bananas is that we can't grow them locally here! By themselves, with peanut putter on them (damn that's good), frozen and blended into "banana ice cream" - so many ways to enjoy them! I also use them in a decent amount of baking (I've had so many omni friends go on about how they can't believe my brownies aren't vegan...the secret ingredient is banana).

awesome! Someone put a lot of effort into making that!

flanders, I don't think anyone here would argue that milk is a health food. I was just pointing out that digestive adaptations can and have occurred in recent human history - so people should keep that in mind if they talk about what we evolved to eat (i.e. that you can't ignore the potential impact that cooking has had on the course of our evolution since we started doing it).

Yeah, that's where my mind went when I first read the title...heh.

Nobody have found anything conclusive. For every study that shows a potential risk, there's usually a replicate that shows nothing...it's really equivocal and there are lots of parties with vested interests in the results (i.e. cell phone companies) so there's a lot of politics involved at the same time. Cell phones have been around long enough now that, if there was a serious risk, you'd really expect to have seen it by now. It seems more likely that there might be a minor risk - or, as one paper I read recently suggested, that maybe cell phone exposure speeds or enhances tumour growth in people who are already developing one, rather than being one of the original causes of the tumour. In any case, the effects are subtle enough that nothing is clear yet. I'm not going to lose sleep over it. I forget to wear sunscreen most of the time (mostly because I never burn), and that cumulative sun exposure certainly increases my risk of skin cancer in a (small) way that is much better documented, so why would I worry about something that may or may not present a similar risk? Then again, I don't use a cell phone all that much. If I was on it for hours and hours every week, maybe I'd feel differently.

Carnitine is not an esssential amino acid. It's sometimes considered "conditionally essential" in that you might not be able to produce enough during periods of rapid growth/pregnancy. They mentioned some vegetarian diets being low in lysine and methionine. This comes back to having a balanced diet - if you're getting high-quality proteins like soy, hemp, pumpkin seed or avocado, and balancing legumes and grains that have complementary amino acids, your diet shouldn't be deficient in lysine or methionine. Also, they mentioned vegetarian diets being deficient in iron - lame. It sounds like these people don't know about proper vegetarian diets, assuming you're not getting all your amino acids or iron. I've sometimes kept track of my iron consumption, and I get tons of it without supplements. I get my iron checked along with the rest of my blood work every year or so, and personally it's never been an issue. Then again, women (vegetarian or otherwise) are more likely to be iron deficient, so I don't have any personal experience on that front.

Wow, I haven't been around for a while (moving and my place doesn't have internet right now), and this thread has had a lot of posts since then! It's not a valid argument to say that dinosaurs, or any other animal for that matter, thrived for millions of years on a raw diet. Tons of animals thrive on a raw all-meat diet. Try feeding that to a human...just because other animals are adapted to eat a certain way doesn't mean that we are similar. I have mentioned this in several threads now, but different animals have wildly different biochemistry. We simply don't work the same way, and to extrapolate from one species to another is a mistake (case in point: vampire bats do great things on a 100% blood diet. I don't think anyone would argue that humans would do the same, so why take an example of a herbivorous, yet equally different animal and draw a comparison?). And something interesting: the digestive system can adapt extremely quickly. Europeans (which branched off from our ancestral African humans well after the start of our species) actually evolved an upregulated lactase enzyme in that relatively short (i.e. thousands of years, not tens or hundreds of thousands) period of isolation. Europeans have a low incidence of lactose intolerance (generally well under 10%) while other groups, such as the Chinese, are the opposite and are almost entirely lactose intolerant. Why? It's a bit of a chicken-egg type situation, but Europeans as a population relied on dairy as a food source and their biology actually changed to reflect that (most likely, the Europeans who could digest milk probably avoided more famine-related deaths and lived to spread there genes while those who couldn't digest it were more frequently faced with famine). Without getting into the semantics of how the use of dairy as a food source co-evolved with the ability for them to digest it, the point is - this population of humans became different, digestively speaking, over the course of just a handful of years in evolutionary terms. We have been cooking for a long time, much longer than the Europeans have been using dairy, so it's certainly possible that our digestive systems have adapted in significant ways to eating cooked food. I'm still not "anti-raw". I eat raw things. They're awesome. I just like jumping in to discuss things from a scientific angle when I can...so I wanted to point out that it's quite possible for us to actually have evolved to specifically handle cooked foods, since I've seen several people take the evolutionary angle in arguing for a raw diet.

Those look really good! I'll have to give that a try.

DV, I just love your posts!

Random point of interest - some Canadian municipalities now chloraminate their water instead of chlorinating it. Chloramines don't evolve out of the water the way chlorine does, so they don't need to overload the water with them at the plant. With chlorine, if you live closer to a water treatment plant, the taste and odour are much stronger than if you live further away. Chloraminated water is consistent in odor and taste throughout the city and these effects are not generally as noticeable. I know Ottawa chloraminates its water, but I have no idea about Vancouver.

Welcome! Good luck reaching your goals.

My lab mate told me about this a few months ago. It is so beyond my comprehension that someone could do this, that I'm really at a loss for words. Somehow, I get the feeling that other people on this board will be the same way. I guess all I can say is that there should really be laws in place to prevent such cruelty, since some people evidently don't have...what's the word...souls?

Thanks! Yeah, these counters are fun, aren't they? And while I've always been more into running /endurance type stuff, I'm the same in that I have so much respect and admiration for people who dedicate themselves to bodybuilding!

They definitely do. My mother makes my grandmother's ridiculously awesome Moroccan olive dish a few times a year, and we get unpickled, unsalted canned olives for that recipe. They're not as easy to find, but they're definitely out there.

Here is my opinion. The technology behind GMOs is one of the greatest advents of our society. It is not GMOs in general that are bad...it's the hideously evil companies like Monsanto that are using that technology in harmful ways, like how their engineered their "roundup-ready" soybeans to be the only plant on earth that can survive being sprayed with their incredibly toxic Roundup herbicide. The idea behind GMOs is actually pretty much what farmers have always done - they crossed 6 different strains of grains, for example, to give the high-yield wheat that we grow commercially today. GMOs are just plants that have specific genes added. Instead of blending two plants 50/50, you can just take the one or two desirable genes from plant A and put them into plant B. Furthermore, you can cross plants that don't have the same number of alleles and therefore could not normally be crossed. Examples of how wonderful GMO technology can be (in the right hands): they've recently been working on developing rice that contains the enzymes to produce vitamin A/beta carotene and other vitamins that rice normally does not contain, in order to prevent childhood blindness in poor countries that depend on rice for food. In this case, all they did was take the genes for vitamin-producing enzymes from plants such as sweet potatoes, and put them into rice. This has the potential to improve nutrition and health for hundreds of millions, possibly billions, of people. Of course, companies like Monsanto are pure seething evil, engineering plants that produce sterile seeds so that you have to buy more seed from them every year, engineering plants to survive increasingly toxic herbicides, etc, etc. So I'm not going to pretend that the current application of GMOs is good overall...but, like so many things we have designed, it can be good in the right hands and harmful in the wrong hands.

This is among the best posts I have read on this forum.

The only person I know who is thrilled with their bowflex is my grandfather. He needs to do back and shoulder exercises in particular to help with pain management. For him, it's great - he doesn't need to bend over to adjust the resistance, it doesn't take much space, etc. Obviously, he is in a different category than someone looking to bulk or cut...I think you should take DV's or chrijs's advice and either join a gym or get a bench and free weights if either of those options are feasible.

My buddy, whom I generally trust when it comes to weightlifting, takes two protein shakes on days when he works out and one the day after. On the day of a workout, he takes the first shake within 15 minutes of finishing his workout, and one immediately before bed. I've had some success doing this, so it must not be too bad...but I'd like to hear other people's advice as well.

Hmm. Could it maybe be a short/tight achilles tendon or calf? That could also explain why your heels lift at that point.

Thanks! My goal is to be 130 pounds by next duathlon season (May 2009). So that's 24 pounds of lean mass over a year. If I have my way, I'd also like to be able to bench that same weight for three full sets of 6-8 reps at that point, and squat 150 for the same number of sets and reps. I think I can do it. Right now it's tough because I'm still training to race at the end of August, and doing so much cardio definitely slows down bulking. Starting in September, my cardio will be down to about 2 hours a week and I'm going to try to hit the weights 3 times a week (and work the legs a lot more), so hopefully the gains will speed up a bit, at least until that "easy beginner" phase ends.

I am not, and never will be, a supporter of PETA. While they love animals, as I do, I think they are idiots who do more damage to our cause than good. Go ahead, spray paint someone's fur coat. They're going to go out and buy another one, and they're now even less likely to listen to your valid arguments. Same thing with all their shock ads. All it's going to do is offend people and close them off to the sensible, practical arguments you could present them with. I really think that PETA activists are selfish. By going out and doing all of these extreme things, they can pat themselves on the back and say "Yeah! I'm out there fighting for my cause!" However, as I said, I believe that they give vegans/animal rights supporters a very bad public image, and that the people they should really be trying to reach - the omnis out there who might some day consider joining us - are really put off by their campaigns. I have 'converted' a fair number of people to vegetarianism and veganism. It was always by leading by example, making them delicious food and calmly explaining my reasons for going vegan when they asked for them. It was not by yelling at them or trying to shock and horrify them. I have never met anyone who went vegetarian because of a PETA ad. I believe the old adage of "you attract more flies with honey than with vinegar" applies here.

woops, double post.