Green Eggs and Bacon

I'm sure you're familiar with the classic kids' book:

If your parents didn't read you this book as a kid, they didn't love you. 
They probably would have read this book (NSFW language!) instead.

However, as you have probably guessed, I'm talking about "green" eggs and bacon here in a metaphorical sense. Public opinion would have you believe that these are both fairly bad for you, and you are better off eating a "balanced breakfast" of cereal and fruit juice, and maybe some low-fat sugar-yogurt. This is tied to the whole "fat phobia" but also the "cholesterol phobia."

I recently talked about the ignorance surrounding fat, but as for cholesterol, I'm not going into great detail because Fat Head (and the supplementary lectures) cover it adequately. Long story short, the important thing is this: dietary cholesterol intake has an insignificant impact on blood cholesterol, and total cholesterol levels are bad indicators of cardiovascular health anyway.

The Incredible Edible Egg

Chicken eggs are the classic breakfast food staple. They're pretty awesome when you think about them-- you can mass produce them without directly killing anything (Ohai, ovo-vegetarians!) and are cheap (I tried really hard to not make a pun right there), they are [relatively] durable and seemingly never go bad, and they are one of the most nutrient-dense foods ever. Vitamins, minerals, and tons of micronutrients like choline, on top of 6 grams of protein a pop, make them really good for you on top of leaving you satiated. After all, it's everything a chick needs to develop to the point of breaking out of its own shell. Oh, and if you haven't realized it, an egg is one giant cell. How cool is that?

 Om nom nom nom nom

One of the worst offenses that the health fitness industry has committed against mankind is to spread the idea that yolks are bad for you, to the point of throwing them away so all you have is the egg whites left. The yolk is the best part, and to toss it is idiotic. There's a saying that goes something like this: "Mother Nature cries every time a yolk hits the wastebasket." If you want so badly to eat only the whites, go buy a carton of them at the store instead of whole eggs. That way the yolks don't go to waste and it's easier on you, since you don't have to strain out the whites.

Eggs are good for weight loss, and the calories (yolk-inclusive) are very much worth it. If one wants to cut calories, they should do so elsewhere.

Bacon (AKA meat candy)

Did you know that cooked bacon has roughly the same amount of fat (of which only 1/3 is saturated, by the way, if that even matters) and protein in it? That's probably a lot better than what you were led to believe. Bear in mind that cooked bacon is very different from raw bacon in terms of fat. It's a good, solid meat that's much better for you than sausage (although that tastes good too; I'm a sucker for bratwurst). Plus, it's delicious.

 Remember this viral video? He was right all along!

It also turns out that turkey "bacon" is not better or worse for you, so you might as well eat the non-kosher stuff.
I love real bacon, but not as much as Ron Swanson:

And of course I have to mention EpicMealTime. To not do so when speaking of bacon would be a sin.

Bacon + Eggs = Win

"Bacon and eggs." It's like one unit. The archetypical epic breakfast combo:

More Parks and Recreation. This is obviously a good show.

And again, EpicMealTime, with a side of Tourette's Guy. Oh, and this song.

Drawbacks

Since they are loved so much, bacon and eggs have to be mass-produced to keep up with demand. With that comes less-than-ideal products. Not to worry though, because they can be dealt with.

Bacon is usually cured with nitrates or nitrites. I don't know much about this, though, so here's a nice scholarly article if you're so inclined to read it. From what I gathered from this and other research is this: don't worry about it if you don't eat tons of bacon at once. If you do, it would benefit you to ingest some vitamin C (e.g., orange juice-- it just so happens to go perfectly with breakfast) or other antioxidants (I try to take some green tea extract every day. It's really good stuff.) to offset any possible bad effects of nitrites/nitrates.

It comes down to personal choice. I've eaten this exact kind before.

It tastes the same as cured bacon.

As for eggs, they are generally fine, but it should come as no surprise to you that the standard, inexpensive variety come from hens that spend most of their lives in a tiny cage in dreadful conditions. They are fed low-quality grains, which are probably infused with antibiotics and other great stuff. But that doesn't make the eggs bad, just sub-optimal.

Eh, it's not like they have feelings.

They're better off than the wee little piggies anyway.

Freakin' watermarks.

If you want optimal, buy the organic/free range eggs. Now, I'm not on the organic bandwagon (I actually buy the huge 36-egg value carton of regular eggs because I'm a college student) but if you're serious about putting only the best stuff into your body, buy the good stuff, because there is a difference: organic egg shells aren't all white, and their yolks are orange.

Not a huge difference, but it's obvious. 

Presumably, more color = more nutrients.

Not all "cage-free" eggs are produced quite like this, though.

So now you know almost everything you could possibly want to about bacon and eggs. Don't avoid them; they're good for you, despite what many would like you to believe.

Silliness, Ignorance, and Gullibility

This post is more or less an amalgamation of many different things that I find annoying, unfortunate, and (sometimes) entertaining.

Common Grammatical Errors

Lose vs. loose:
If you lose a lot of weight, your pants will become loose.

Workout vs. work out:
'Workout' is a noun, and 'work out' is a verb.
I'm going to work out at the gym this evening, even though I'm still sore from Monday's workout.

Regimen vs. regiment vs. regime:
'Regimen' is an exercise plan. 'Regiment' is an infantry division in the military. 'Regime' is a government in power.
The new regime drafted many men into a regiment and put them through a very strenuous training regimen.

BMI

The Body Mass Index is probably the most abused thing in the realm of health and fitness.
The BMI is a population statistics tool, and NOT to be used by individuals to determine healthiness.
It is USELESS as an individual tool because it does not differentiate between lean and fatty weight. There are many body types that make it pointless for use by individuals, such as being "skinny-fat" or being big and muscular. These variations in type tend to cancel each other out, statistically speaking.

BMI is a silly thing that receives an inordinate amount of attention. Ignore what anyone else has to say about it. The most useful tool for determining body type is a mirror.

Ignorant Training Misconceptions

This is the kind of stuff that intersects with some of my other blog posts.

First and foremost is the idea that cardio counts as a full workout and is all you need to do at the gym. Women and people trying to lose weight are the most frequent perpetrators. I'm not going into detail because I've talked about this before, but it is almost always impossible to achieve your ideal body without resistance training.

Intrinsically related to this concept of not lifting weights is the stupid conception that resistance training will automatically make you big and 'bulky.' This is ridiculous. You can never accidentally get too muscular. Even people who try hard to build muscle have a hard time doing so. This is especially true for women, who have nowhere near as much testosterone as men do, which is a powerful anabolic hormone. Women bodybuilders of the grotesque kind invariably take steroids, without which it would be impossible to look the way they do.

By the way, bodybuilding is not so one-dimensional. There are actually 3 major categories in which women compete: full-on bodybuilding (AKA gross), figure, and bikini. The latter usually consists of what women commonly perceive to be the 'perfect body,' but, to be fair, most of them have breast implants.

 And this is why women should lift weights.

But just lifting weights isn't enough. You have to do it right, and a lot of people mess even that up. It's not as simple as picking things up and putting them down.

The most widespread training error is using weights that are too light. This accomplishes nothing but wasting time and burning a nominal amount of energy. Often it's under the pretense of "toning." As I've said before, "toning" exercises are not a real thing. You can develop muscle, or you can lose fat (all over your body, that is; spot reduction is not a real thing either) but you generally can't do both simultaneously. Either way, lifting light weights is ineffective for improving your body because it sucks as a weight-loss method too. You can probably burn calories faster by floundering around in a wading pool with a water aerobics class for senior citizens.

Thank God they're not wearing bikinis.

On the other end of the spectrum are the guys who use too much weight. It's extremely easy to spot this mistake because too much weight almost always causes bad form. It's usually counterproductive too, because bad form usually means poor Range of Motion (which means poor exercise quality), and it also means a higher risk of injury. Plus, it makes you look like an idiot.

Aside from lifting too light or too heavy, there's the problem of lifting wrong.
What I mean by this is an overemphasis on machines relative to free weights, and an overemphasis on isolation exercises relative to compound exercises.

Free weights are vastly superior to machines, with a handful of exceptions. In general, machines force your body to do unnatural and artificial movements, and free weight exercises allow your body to move according to its own physiology. Machines also fail to work the many small "stabilizer" muscles that are synergists to the bigger muscles. Machines also overpromote isolation exercise.

The bicep curl machine. What a worthless piece of crap.

Too much emphasis on isolation (that is, working one thing at a time: biceps, triceps, abs, etc.) and not enough on compound movements (working many things at once: squats, deadlifts, bench press, overhead press, etc.) often results in an unbalanced physique and real-world weakness. In addition, compound free weights are superior to those used in isolation for development of many "accessory" muscles.

But I'm not just asserting what I've learned vicariously; I experienced the difference between machines and isolation and compound free weights firsthand, but that is a long story that I am saving for later.

Speaking of isolation, I'm going to go back to spot reduction and talk about that in better detail. This is goes hand-and-hand with the idea of toning, which is why I mentioned it earlier.
The most common toning/spot reduction exercises I see women do are crunches, ab machine work, and flopping legs back and forth on the leg adductor and abductor machines. They spend ridiculous amounts of time doing these and give them so much attention.

Yes, those machines.

People think that if you work a muscle a lot (meaning low weight and high reps) that muscle becomes more "toned" and the fat above the muscle being worked is used, in part, as fuel for the movement. This kind of makes sense, but your body just doesn't work that way.

Your body picks where it likes to have fat. The place where your body likes it most is where it is the slowest to come off. Conversely, the place where it likes it the least is the fastest to come off. You can't cherry-pick the areas you want to be lean. The only thing you can do is to lower your total bodyfat percentage.
(addendum: technically speaking, spot reduction does exist, but only in a technical and not a practical sense)

If there were a video that summarized everything not to do which I just talked about, this would be it.
This pisses me off so much. Yeah, being a model is REALLY TOUGH, alright. Those workouts are sooooo hard! Idiocy and good genetics right there. But it's not entirely her fault-- this personal trainer is an IMBECILE. I'll talk about trainers in a future blog post.

As Seen on TV

If you try to recall the first commercial of some bogus fitness product that comes to mind, you'll probably think of these ridiculous ab machines, or maybe the infamous shake weight:

Facepalm. 

By the way, big surprise, "dynamic inertia" is a pseudoscientific term.

(I should know, I'm a mechanical engineering student.)
I liked the parody better anyway.

To people with common sense, it should be obvious that producers hire bodybuilders or models to promote their product. They didn't get ripped from it. Sometimes more 'normal' people are used in testimonials, and their transformations almost never result from the use of one extra product. If something is too good to be true, it probably is.

Speaking of ridiculous ads, there's a rip-off of 5 Hour Energy that has even cheesier commercials. So many things are wrong with this: she's not really sweating, she doesn't appear to be actually working/breathing hard, and she is SWITCHING FROM ONE CARDIO MACHINE TO THE OTHER. DIDN'T I JUST TALK ABOUT THIS!? GAAAAAAAH! POSITIVE FEEDBACK = NEVERENDING CYCLE OF IGNORANCE!

Of course most of these things seen on TV are ridiculous. I mean, have you actually seen anyone use these in real life? Sadly, there are some recent products that are just as ridiculous that have seemed to take off-- namely, toning shoes.

I'm sure you're familiar with those things. You know, the ones with the completely absurd commercials? Yeah, well, people fall for them. Luckily, though, some people have working brains.
I don't know about Skechers, but Reebok paid a hefty price for all that false advertising.

I have nothing to say other than "FAIL!"

These retarded shoes had a predecessor: the Fit Flop. This clip summarizes why either of them don't work. If you want a good butt and legs, you need to do squats and deadlifts.

Pretty depressing, right? Well, these things don't hold a candle to the Power Balance wristband.

This makes me so livid that I'm going to have to bust out the CAPS LOCK (AGAIN):

YOU HAVE TO BE A SPECIAL KIND OF STUPID TO SINCERELY BELIEVE THAT HAVING A PLASTIC BRACELET WITH A SHINY STICKER ON IT IS ACTUALLY GOING TO DO SOMETHING!

But you know what? I'm not mad at the creators of the Power Balance band. In fact, I envy them. They got filthy stinkin' rich off of American stupidity. Capitalism at its finest.

And then there is CieAura, Power Balance's inbred cousin, which skips the plastic and involves putting a shiny sticker right on your skin:

WARNING: May make you lose faith in humanity. Watch at your own risk.
"Put one on your forehead and you'll turn into Dr. Manhattan!"

To finish, I might as well mention the one infomercialized product that is actually worth it: the famous P90X. I'll do a post on P90X soon.

Not pictured: The Free Version

Fat Phobia

If you've seen Fat Head, you have an idea why fats have been demonized for the most part. But it's really gotten out of hand, and now advertising has ensured that this cycle of ignorance is going to continue for a very long time. Every other food commercial you see on TV emphasizes that the product has a low amount of fat, if any. Often foods are listed as X calories and Y grams of fat, as if they are independent quantities. I'm really sick of it. Here's a clip of people with bad accents talking about it briefly.

 Fat Free does not necessarily mean "better." Yoplait adds tons of sugar to compensate for the lack of taste. Yogurt is good, but not this crap. Eat Greek yogurt instead: the low- and non-fat versions don't add any sugar and as a result are chock full of protein.

This Seinfeld clip sums up the worst of the ignorance surrounding dietary fat in a satirical fashion.

Recalling Fat Head again, fats are almost the exact opposite of what public opinion would have you believe: they're good for you, even saturated fat. Yes, really.

One kind of fat stands out as being especially good: coconut oil. It's actually a kind of saturated fat, but it's a "medium chain" fat which has some 'magical' properties. Here are two videos on the topic.

But of course there are some bad fats. The processed kinds you don't find in nature.

First, I present to you canola oil. Now this oil just drips with irony (I apologize for that horrible pun). It's touted as one of the "healthiest" oils, but it's chemically derived. And... well, see for yourself:

And then there are the oh-so vilified trans fats. Now, believe it or not, not all kinds of trans fat are as evil as Hitler. But one kind is incredibly bad for you: hydrogenated oil. It's surprisingly common in some processed foods. Try not to eat that at all, if you can help it.

Now here comes the rage-inducing part: FDA rules say that nutritional labels can have rounded-down amounts of whatever is in the food, to the nearest gram. So that means there can be .4 grams in one serving and you can slap a big 'ol shiny sticker on the front that screams "ZERO TRANS FATS!" And that's not all- a 'serving' is a completely arbitrary quantity, and as such it can be exploited. 0.8 grams of trans fats in a serving of a quarter cup? Not a problem, make the serving size half as big and then you can say that there is 0g of trans fats in your product.

Peanut butter is one of the most flagrant abusers of this rule. When you get peanut butter, look at the ingredient list. Don't buy it if hydrogenated oil of any kind is in there. Look instead for "natural" peanut butter. This is the good stuff without the hydrogenated trans fats. 

 See the yellow sticker? No trans fat, my ass!

Hydrogenated oils prevent the natural peanut oil from separating from the rest of the peanut butter, sparing you from having to stir it all the time. This would be nice if it didn't do evil things to your body. There are natural peanut butters, however, that have non-hydrogenated oils added that prevent the oil from separating-- in that case, it's usually palm oil.

Relevant: Tourette's Guy (NSFW language and hilarity)

I don't think I did a good enough job of attacking the stupid cultural phobia of fat, so I might come back to this later. But the take-away lesson is this: calories are what matter most; for yogurt, go Greek; for peanut butter, go natural.

Oh, and avoid skim milk.