Nutrition: Avoiding Disease & Optimizing Performance PDF

NUTRITION: AVOIDING DISEASE AND OPTIMIZING PERFORMANCE Adapted from Coach Glassman’s Sept. 9, 2007, L1 lecture in Quantico, Virginia, and Oct. 14, 2007, L1 lecture in Flagstaff, Arizona. The CrossFit message is contrarian. It is against the...

NUTRITION: AVOIDING DISEASE AND OPTIMIZING PERFORMANCE Adapted from Coach Glassman’s Sept. 9, 2007, L1 lecture in Quantico, Virginia, and Oct. 14, 2007, L1 lecture in Flagstaff, Arizona. The CrossFit message is contrarian. It is against the grain of what occurs at most commercial gyms. They have machines; we detest them. They use isolation movements; we use compound movements. They use low intensity; we use high intensity. Everything about this message is for many people antithetical to all they thought they knew. With nutrition, the theme continues: What most every- one thinks is wrong. In July of 1989 in the Archives of Internal Medicine, Norman Kaplan wrote an absolutely breathtaking bit of research. It is an analysis that has gone com- pletely unchallenged. He was able to demonstrate by an operative mechanism, through correlation, and more importantly causally, that hyperinsulinism is at the root of the “deadly quartet” (i.e., upper-body obesity, glucose intolerance, hypertriglyceridemia and hypertension). Hyperinsulinism—too much insulin— was the cause. If you are healthy, insulin is the normal and essential response to the ingestion of carbohydrate. Insulin is a hormone produced by the pancreas, and you cannotLevel 1 Training Guide METHODOLOGY Nutrition: Avoiding Disease and Optimizing Performance, continued Copyright © 2020 CrossFit, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Level 1 Training Guide | 46 of 255 live without it. You can either produce insulin through the pancreas, you can inject it, or you can die. Insulin is responsible for storage of energy in cells. (Glu- cagon is the counter-regulatory hormone to insulin: It releases the energy out of the cells.) And one of the things that insulin puts into cells is fat. You can see that the way to get your insulin level too high (hyperinsulinism) is to eat too much carbohydrate. How much carbohydrate is that? In the qualitative sense, your insulin level is “too high” if it is driving up your blood pressure, mak- ing you fat or reducing your ability to suppress blood sugar after eating carbo- hydrate. If you are glucose intolerant, hypertensive or your triglycerides are too high, you are getting too much insulin and thus too much carbohydrate. These are risk factors for heart disease, and the process by which we induce athero- sclerotic disease—arteries paved over with plaque. This leads to thrombosis, oc- clusion, myocardial infarct and debilitation and death. But when physicians are polled “what is it that you do not want to get?” cancer and heart disease do not rate nearly so high as does Type 2 diabetes. And I can tell you how to get it. Type 2 diabetes is caused by a receptor down- grade phenomenon on the liver, muscle, and fat cells. They have a receptor site where insulin attaches. It is similar to a key tting in a lock—speci c shapes on each allow them to bind together. When insulin binds to the receptor, the cell can now receive all good things, including amino acids (proteins) and fat. If you expose yourself to too much insulin, the cells and receptors become “blind” to it. The key does not work as well in the lock; i.e., receptor downgrade phenom- enon. The mechanism is not really much different mechanically than staring at the sun. At rst, your eyes see light, but if you do it for a few minutes, you will never see any light again. You just burned out the receptors. That is what hap- pens in Type 2 diabetes. What was revolutionary about Kaplan’s work is that it disproved an accepted model. Traditionally, what was observed over tens of years was that individuals often rst gained weight (obesity), then their cholesterol went up (hypercholes- terolemia), then their blood pressure went up (hypertensive), and then they be- come diabetic. There was an assumption—and it is a classical logical fallacy—that the ordering suggested causality. That because this happened rst, then this—it was the root cause of all the other conditions. This model is now understood to be fatally awed (i.e., a post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy). Order of events does not necessitate causality. Kaplan was able to demonstrate with powerful evidence that hyperinsulinism was the cause of all these conditions, the cause of atherosclerotic disease and cardiac death. All of this is collectively known as coronary heart disease (CHD).Level 1 Training Guide METHODOLOGY fi fl fi fi fi fi  Nutrition: Avoiding Disease and Optimizing Performance, continued Copyright © 2020 CrossFit, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Level 1 Training Guide | 47 of 255 There has been a very powerful shift and re-understanding that what is causing heart disease is not dietary-fat intake but excessive consumption of carbohy- drate. Things like the French paradox show that there is no paradox. The para- digm was awed. The French eat many times the fat that Americans do and yet have a much smaller frequency of heart disease. They also consume just a little bit under 5 percent of the re ned sugar we do. We are eating about 150 lb. of sugar per man, woman, and child annually. It is amazing what efforts we will exert to consume sugar. Your interest in car- bohydrates, and it is profound, is really no different than your interest in beer or opiates. Sugar tickles the brain and it feels good. And the excuses and things people will do to get to that high are unbelievable. Now I tell you how to avoid all of that. Eat a diet of meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch and no sugar. Do that and you are exempt. Meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch, no sugar—and no coronary heart disease. It has nothing to do with genetics. The genetic part is an intolerance to excess amounts of carbohydrate. It is no different than having a genetic predisposition to alcoholism. Having the gene for alcoholism does not mean it will necessarily be expressed. You would have to drink alcohol. If you do not drink alcohol, you prob- ably will not suffer from alcoholism, at least not in the clinical manifestation of it. It is no different with atherosclerotic disease. I do not care what your grandfather died of, your mother died of, your uncle died of, your brother died of. For exam- ple, Dr. Barry Sears, all his uncles and father died at 49 years old from atheroscle- rotic-induced thrombosis, myocardial infarct, heart attack. All of them. He is not going to. He is not eating the carbohydrates they ate. Eat meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch, no sugar. To get to the same endpoint, these are effective nutritional strategies for avoiding heart disease, death and misery: 1) If you could not have harvested it out of your garden or farm and eaten it an hour later, it is not food. 2) Shop around the perimeter of the grocery store, and do not go down the aisles.Level 1 Training Guide METHODOLOGY Nutrition: Avoiding Disease and Optimizing Performance, continued Copyright © 2020 CrossFit, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Level 1 Training Guide | 48 of 255 3) If it has a food label on it, it is not food. You do not see that on the chicken. It is not on the tomatoes. But it is on the chips and cookies. 4) If it is not perishable, if it says “Best if used before 2019,” it is not food. In 1995, we were delivering almost the same lecture with just less clinical experi- ence. And people were like: “You are kidding me?” and “Fat makes you fat, right?” It is not true. OPTIMIZING PERFORMANCE The next layer to diet is about optimizing performance. Through a diet of meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch, no sugar, you will not be so lucky as to optimize your output. To get a sub-three-minute Fran, you need to weigh and measure your meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds, fruit and starch, and you need to eliminate sugar. I wish it were not true. I wish the path of tness was riding bicycles and drinking beer. I wished that is how we did it. It does not work. What you have to do is eat meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch, no sugar, and then get a scale and measuring cup. You need accuracy and precision to your consump- tion or you will never get in a jet stream of elite performance. If you want to have top-fuel-type performance, you need top fuel. I wish it were otherwise. What do I base this on? No one has ever demonstrated to me anything but inferior capacity on a diet where they did not weigh and measure. I am not telling you that you have to weigh and measure your food. But I am telling you that you are not going to get anywhere in terms of optimizing your perfor- mance on a bad diet. And we have seen enough incidences now. I have worked with tens of thousands of people: No one has ever done it. fl fi fi  You need to weigh and measure your food. Not forever, but at least to start. It is also good to go back to weighing and measuring once in a while. What happens is that the portion requirements diminish for all the foods you do not like. “Yes, I only need one spear of asparagus. Ice cream? I think it was a pound.” You will bias in the wrong direction. I can take any cohort, get one of them to weigh and measure food, and he or she will pull away. There are very few things you can do short of doing more pull-ups that can get you more pull-ups other than eating the way we recommend it. There is a one-to-one correspondence between elite CrossFit performance and the accu- racy and precision of their consumption. And what you are going to nd is performance improvement after performance improvement, but at some point you will want to stop the athlete from leaning outLevel 1 Training Guide METHODOLOGY Nutrition: Avoiding Disease and Optimizing Performance, continued Copyright © 2020 CrossFit, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Level 1 Training Guide | 49 of 255 further. It is possible you will get too lean to perform well. You may nd a plateau in your output, and then you need to ratchet it up. (I do the same thing for hard gain- ers; I increase their intake as I do not need them to lean out.) The rst step: When you get as lean as you want to be and before there is a diminution in performance, double the fat. If you do not feel a whole lot better, maybe try three times the fat. And if that does not feel a whole lot better, and instead you just get thicker, then go back to two times the fat. But I would let performance tell me what to do. In making modi cations, I want to see any kind of change in physiognomy. I have more room to play with when someone has extra padding; I have to be more careful with someone who is already ripped. The formula for calculating what is relevant and pertinent to your prescription is lean body mass and activity level. Done. There is not an inherent difference for men versus women, for young versus old. I want to know how active you are and I want to know what your lean body mass is. And everything else is not germane, not pertinent, not relevant. It is extraneous information. In the vagaries and contingencies of everyday living, such as schedules and appe- tite, there are uctuations in intake that will occur without weighing and measur- ing. Following these normal uctuations puts you on a coarser path versus the ne path required for optimized performance. And that is why you will not get there by luck. It is also possible an average CrossFit athlete becomes extraordinary this way. Commitment and focus are going to overcome genetic limitations. If you commit to the effort, you stand a much better chance. We have had this fantastic experi- ence of playing with this. In any cohort, one pulls away when he or she is weighing and measuring food in this 40-30-30 milieu of macronutrient intake. fi fl fi fl fi fi fi