Since weeks I wanted to write a scientific outline about this subject. My searches have been frustrating, the papers I finally retrieved are not very concise reflecting a situation of not-knowing a lot.
The studies available look at the various parameters we usually measure, if we design a study in sports and experience science. I just want to list some of them here: maximal oxygen uptake, resting and maximal heart rate, blood pressure, cardiac output and other cardiac functions, erythropoiesis, hemolysis, energy expenditure and balance, blood ammonia, muscle glykogen, creatine kinase, cortisol, testosterone, catecholamines, different ratios, cytokines, growth factors, immune parameters, sleep patterns, mood scores and many more. Each study picks another focus, but the whole picture is missing.
The guys from the Science of Sport blog posted a smart video on the placebo effect. I love this topic, because for me it shows clearly the dilemma of natural science. The scientific work and its discourse is all about what is true and what is false, and how to prove it. Science is permanently pursuing the goal of proving a proposition to be true or false. Within this mindset a placebo is a weird creature, it involves feelings and perception, and effects seem to evolve from the void. A placebo is obviously efficacious, but the scientific proof of its efficacy is missing, at least if science is applying its own rules.
With his article in the "Triathlete Europe" Mario Fraioli gave me a good reason to dive a little bit more into the topic of chronobiology. Mario Fraioli's conclusions in his text are that the time of the day has got an influence on performance and strength. He simply observed that his running performance was conspicuously better in the afternoon and early evenings compared to the early mornings. His observations are very much in line with the applied and experimental work available. To collect substantial scientific evidence about how our body clock influences performance is extremely demanding from a methodical and practical viewpoint.
This may astonish you because I assume many of you experience fluctuations of performance during a daytime. But if it comes to science you have to measure, you have to know what to measure at what time and how often, and on top of this, data has to be reproducible. I want to briefly give you an idea of the complexity of the problem that science is facing, if it sticks to its own rules of gaining reproducible data by the means of experiments.
There was a real hype around these Power Balance wrist bands last year. A lot of celebrities from Beckham to de Niro bought into this stuff, and a lot of athletes did.
I thought I give this wrist band some attention today, because it astonishes me that so many athletes buy/bought into this stuff, athletes that use to question biestmilch in a very radical way, athletes who are so hooked on numbers and science, who use powermeters and tracking devices, and love to argue that their decisions are driven by scientific evidence. Power Balance, this expensive rubber bracelet, tells a completely different story.
It just happened to me these days that I was entangled in a weird mess of communication and misunderstanding. Everything around me started boiling, it was amazing how a molehill became a mountain. It is interesting that exactly today I discovered this talk of Temple Grandin on TED, and it helped me to regain some peace in my mind, because I had started doubting myself in a way that was not constructive anymore.
As I see it, one of the major handicaps in communication is that we are jumping to conclusions, that we are concerned about the similarities among us by neglecting, ignoring or even discriminating the differences.
Currently Ross Tucker is writing about this topic on the Science of Sport blog. I want to pick up this topic very briefly, because as we know even among lean athletes weight is a crucial issue of discussion all the year through. The gossip around training your metabolism to burn more fat is fairly noisy, controversial and not very profoundly based on evidence. This has got to do with the fact that reliably measuring parameters of energy consumption and moreover to measure the kind of energy used is not trivial.
I was just translating Chris' text about his eating and cooking habits today, a contribution for a cooking book for triathletes. As we all know, good food is a very essential part of health and performance. And I think there is not one athlete who does not know about the importance of food for peak performance, but probably few live this premise.
Living it is yet another story
May be a reason for this deficit that nature science has not really been able to understand the physiological processes the various foods induce as a whole? May be another reason that we are so "facts-driven" that we don't trust our experience, and the experiences of human of hundreds of years?
It does not help to analyse the components of a food to understand its effects as a whole. We cannot simply compile the effects of every single element. The effects are an emergent phenomenon that is more than the addition of the parts – it means that food stuff is complex thing.
Because of this situation for many of us the healthiness of food is a rather vague and arbitrary term. The discrepancy, the split between scientific knowledge and experience is very pronounced in relation to food. The history of science of food is short, but experience dates back into ancient times. From food stuff medicinal products have been extracted ever since. Nowadays we have labs synthesizing compounds we know as ingredients of foods that we have identified as healthy or curing. From a chemical and biochemical viewpoint this products are the same. But there is a difference the compound from the lab are purer, they are mono-substances, they loose the properties of ingredients which are polyvalent. Purity does not necessarily mean better and more efficient. It may even be that the unharmed (healthy) complexity of the ingredients gives food its special power.
Main features of good=healthy food
- antioxidant
- antimicrobial
- anti-inflammatory
- anti-carcinogenic
Yesterday before I decided to upload this video, I knew that it would cause controversial reactions and eventually antagonize people. I made the decision to publish this video anyhow, because it shows the problem we currently face with the swine flu in a very charming way. In times where you hear voices that even want to forbid a friendly handshake or the grabbing hold of the handle in a bus the most different perspectives through which we see the world are disclosed, and may eventually roughly collide.
Since years the notion that hygiene is the solution for the increasing number of virus infections or allergies is under scientific scrutiny. The huge amount of data indicates that hygiene is very likely leading us up the garden path.