Hi,
So you’ve just stumbled (or been forcibly guided towards) my new blog site, and now you’re here you’re thinking.. well probably something along the lines of – what on earth is this…

This is the post for you.

Lifting the bar/ltb/whatever you want to call it is my outlet.

For those that don’t know, I have a keen interest in anything fitness and nutrition based, and spend a lot of my time reading the latest research journals and absorbing everything I can about those subjects. It’s a fascination that stems probably from being a perfectionist, and just plain curiosity most the time. It also means that I see a lot of interpretations of research by others (including large companies), and the questionable conclusions that these people sometimes come to from the results. You’d be amazed how much of this mis-information finds it’s way onto billboards, tv adverts, and plastered on the packaging of some of your favourite products. It’s the reason a lot of people have very misguided ideas about what they put into their bodies, and I want to change that.

So what is this about?

If you want to read the blog, and take the advice on board as a means to an end (ie. to reach a specific goal like fat-loss, muscle gain, etc) please do that, that will massage my ego more than enough. But there’s also a side mission here, and it’s to get rid of all the garbage and myths that you hear about nutrition.

When you really take a look at nutrition, it’s worrying what is deemed common knowledge and taken as given by most people. The best example I can give you of this would be the fear every ‘sane’ person has of saturated fat. You’d do well to find any link between saturated fat alone and heart disease that wasn’t tenuous at best. Low Carb High Fat (LCHF) diets have been shown to have higher markers of heart health time and again versus their conventional counterparts (ie. the average person diet), and yet these have a much higher saturated fat content – so why does everyone fear it so much?

I just want to offer people good advice, and make them aware of what the science really says about what they put in – and how they treat – their bodies.

The fact is that the majority of nutritional research is paid for by companies looking for a slogan they can use to sell their products. ie. the money for a study only comes in if a company feels the results of said study may supply them with ammunition to sell their product. And the legislation to stop half-claims, or wild interpretations of results is not doing you many favors. When a company claims something like ‘drink our whey protein while dieting to keep your muscle from fading away’ they’ve taken from research that some types of protein has a blunting effect on catabolism (muscle breakdown). Studies have shown that whey protein doesn’t have that blunting effect, but companies can still market their product as catabolism-preventing.

Not everything I say will be a guaranteed fact, but it will be the closest thing you’ll find to one on the subject at the current time.

I’m not going to set out making huge claims like everything I say is going to always be 100% irrefutably, the truthiest piece of fact-based talk you’ve ever read – the very studies and ideas that I’m talking about usually leave themselves open to interpretation which means that simply isn’t always going to happen – but I can promise you that I am, to the best of my knowledge, giving you as close to a factoid as the area of topic currently allows. If there is evidence to the contrary of what I say – I will let you know.

That’s all for now, but look out for some posts coming thick and fast in the next few days. And potentially some design changes (major or minor) as I’m a horrific perfectionist and I hate my design already.

much love

Dan