ectogemia

Hnnnghghghh... I want to do this so badly, but I just can't. Stupid school and other musical obligations edit: Guess I'll just have to fucking destroy all of you in the WCRG

o: This sounds like an awesome compo. Too bad I'm waaaaaaaaaay too busy for it.

I'm with you, man. Fitocracy is just data entry, in my opinion And waking up early to work out? Never.

Ok, now for a slightly more serious answer than my last one. I'm a pathological completionist. For instance, I *hate* that new games have achievements because it distracts me from, like, just playing the damn game because instead I find myself doing retarded, repetitive tasks just to complete the next achievement. Reason #230942398 I stick with retro games... although I don't really play games all that often anymore D:

Sometimes I don't masturbate when I play hentai games. I can't really explain it.

Time for a 90 day check-in. So on day 1, I was weak and 143 lbs. On day 90, I'm significantly less weak and 170 lbs. My major lifts (all of these are 3x5): squats = 250 lbs deadlifts = 305 lbs bench = 165 lbs (my chest is weak, get off me ) overhead barbell press = 120 lbs dips = body weight + 75 lbs chin-ups = body weight + 25 lbs pull-ups = body weight x 9 reps on top set (I'll start weighting this and doing 3x5 once I hit 10 reps on my top set) I'm damn proud of these results And damn sick of eating this much food. But the skinny little MAGBody you all saw back in DC is no more, and that is an awesome feeling! My goal is to deadlift OA into oblivion.

Read those ingredients, Brandon No more Taco Bell, man. Lmao @ the empanadas and potatoes. If you ever want to see the paragon of frankenfoods modern food chemists have come up with, check out packaged "potatoes." I have no fucking idea how they can legally call those potatoes. Probably through the same logic used by Congress to label pizza a vegetable. WHY

AWWW YEAHHHH. Perfect rate of weight loss for muscle preservation, too. You gon' b ripped.

I mean, I guess, but since this isn't a single-elimination tournament like the SZRC or the GRMRB, et al., who cares if there's a tie at the end of any given week? The odds of there being a tie at the end of the whole compo are pretty low, so that weekly 0.5 point bonus is just sort of a meritless additional boost to whomever has the most free time If there's a tie at the end of the compo, I believe the fairest and most appropriate way to break it is to have the tied artists create a short track/loop and open up voting on that. This is a music competition, after all. It only makes sense to break ties with more music.

Gonna second all of this. It's definitely a good thing to have a round going at all times so that we all have something to work towards at all times. The bonus point is basically a weekly -0.5 point handicap for me since I likely won't ever be able to submit my track first. Like... it's unfair to the point that if the rule remains, I won't be participating in the compo again because it would make it impossible to win if the rounds remain as close as the first did. Nope, but it's an option.

Not sure I'm cool with that bonus 0.5 points. I've got a busy, hectic life thanks 2 skool, so it's likely I'll be submitting my tunes late each round, so that basically precludes me from getting the bonus. NOT FAIR, BRO If there's a tie, why not have a bonus round to break the tie? Something quick, like "create a 90 second loop".

Studies show artificial crab causes mutations in vitro, and research performed in animal models suggests that imitation crab may be linked to high cholesterol. I would really stick to grass-fed, grass-FINISHED crab.

The key to weight loss I've been talking about this whole time. Finally, someone gets it.

2 important points: 1) it ain't no carb; 2) buy a damn scale, dude... edit: And yet you bought several video games the day before, haha

This is the best idea I've ever heard in my entire life, ever, and I've seen George W. Bush debate.

I think you missed the part about arterial compliance being primarily determined by blood pressure, not exercise That's the most important part of this discussion we're having now, what gives the Masai the arterial compliance to render their atherosclerotic plaques a nonfactor to prevent heart disease. Also, the authors' conclusion regarding physical activity being the preventative agent was conjecture. Read the language of that sentence again. It wasn't a fact. They were guessing. I am making a guess as well because I don't plan on doing a randomized control trial on the Masai any time soon, but I believe it to be a better guess because blood pressure is universally known to be the strongest tie to arterial compliance. Exercise is a thing which REQUIRES arterial compliance to be done properly. This is why when people who actually HAVE chronic disease like coronary artery disease cannot even walk up a flight of stairs without doubling over from lack of oxygen. Their arteries cannot expand well anymore, so their atherosclerotic plaques end up occluding their blood vessels and preventing blood from getting to the heart and muscles and organs. Aaaand that's all the time I care to devote to this. I think we've laid out the bulk of each of our arguments in this thread. You may think I'm misleading people, but another person who reads exactly what I had to say may think I'm on the right track. I can live with that. God have mercy on the person who actually reads through everything we had to say, but I'm OK with someone on the internet disagreeing with me, so I'm going to leave this debate where it is. I've got too many things to do and not enough time to do them. Convincing someone over the internet of something is right around the bottom of my priority list now. You're still a good guy <3

The Masai have extremely low rates of HEART DISEASE, yet they have evidence of atherosclerosis (not itself a chronic disease but a potential cause of one) upon autopsy. This is an extremely important disconnect worth some more attention here. This study suggests one reasonable explanation. If my blood pressure and blood lipids are as favorable as those of the Masai and I'm a physically fit person, I'm still missing the part where I should be concerned about my diet's high fat content. A single atherosclerotic plaque is no biggie if it isn't affecting the local blood pressure in a significant manner. Not until a plaque is so occlusive that ischemia occurs or a rupture from high pressure due to the deformation from the plaque occurs is there any issue. Masai blood vessels remained compliant (able to expand and contract) as suggested by the aortal dilation found in the study. The #1 physiological factor relating to compliance blood pressure. High blood pressure is strongly linked to poor arterial compliance. If my blood pressure is 110/70ish like the Masai, I fully expect my aorta and all downstream vessels to be compliant enough to make any plaques I do have a nonfactor by expanding enough to allow blood to continue to flow as needed. And I sorta feel like this is becoming a tit-for-tat sort of thing. I really don't have the time or the will, even, to keep at it. edit: Fitocracy!

You can't do the same with the prevailing recommendations which reign over a society where the #1 cause of death is cardiovascular disease, but time will tell how things turn out for me... ... but I'll settle for current research. Anthropological research. While it's awesome that you clearly understand natural selection for what it really is, you're forgetting one major, major thing. Modern day hunter-gatherers still exist, and they are studied extensively. We can actually look at elderly "cavemen" who lived well beyond childbearing age to see what old age in an "evolutionary" human is like. There's an African tribe, the Maasai, which eats red meat and dairy almost exclusively, and they are thin, healthy, cavity-free, and have almost no incidence of any chronic disease, even among their elderly. Feel free to read any of the existing studies on them. Then please explain why it is you continue to believe that chronic, heavy consumption of grass-fed red meat is of any concern whatsoever to me. There's no confounding variables in studying their diet. All whole foods. All sourced from nature. Almost all red meat, blood, and dairy. Negligible chronic disease in the elderly. Why?

Hate to double post, but I think I was running out of characters in my other one, haha. Thanks for sharing that, Joe! That's amazing that your wife healed so significantly! And that really seems to be par for the course for this Paleo-or-whatever thing, and that's pretty damn amazing, too. I used to think theory was more important that practice until I started actually doing science where I learned that they theory we quote from -- science itself -- is rife with bias, fabrication, and complacency and until I started doing Paleo where I learned that an evolutionary approach to reading the scientific literature helps you achieve the best results. I know it wouldn't seem like I'm a practice-before-theory sort of decision-maker just from reading my posts in here, but I really am. It just so happens that I'm also very interested in biology, so I'm pretty well-read on the literature, and I've found I can augment my results with those bits of theory, especially in the gym where things aren't as common-sense as the Paleo guidelines.

That much is true, but when mechanisms aren't known, conclusions should be drawn from the raw data set using the overarching framework of that scientific discipline. Geology has plate tectonics theory. Chemistry has atomic theory. Physics has quantum theory (or whatever they've reduced things to now). Biology has evolutionary theory. Perhaps the most frequently repeated saying in biology is this quote from Theodosius Dobzhansky, "Nothing in biology makes sense except in light of evolution." This is also the most woefully forgotten saying in biology. If you generate a set of biological data and draw a completely unevolutionary conclusion from it, then either we need to revise evolutionary theory around your conclusion (should it prove to be correct) or you should revise your conclusion so that it makes sense within the conceptual framework of that science. Nutritional science is a subdiscipline of biology, and nothing in biology makes sense except in light of evolution. Therefore, nothing in nutritional science makes sense except in light of evolution. Unfortunately, most nutritional research is not interpreted through a lens of evolution. It is instead loose epidemiological data. Interpretations of those data sets are haphazard because most nutrition scientists do not consider evolution when trying to understand their data. This, in my opinion, is what leads to the general feeling of the layperson towards nutritional studies that "no one knows what they're talking about" or "they said that was good for you 2 years ago, but now they say it doesn't do anything for you?" You don't really see that sort of confusion with any other science, and that's because other sciences have their shit together. They have a framework, they use it, the same set of data is generally understood in a similar manner from scientist to scientist, and the debates within the fields tend not to be over the fundamentals, of the field, but the real outskirts of unexplored knowledge. Nutrition scientists HAVE this conceptual framework in evolution, they just don't acknowledge it for some reason. Thus, all the confusion, all the contradictory conclusions, all the ineffective policies and recommendations, etc. This isn't just my theory, either. There's a growing movement in the scientific and medical community called "evolutionary medicine" which is trying to augment the current but conceptually disconnected "evidence-based medicine" approach to doing and understanding biology by ensuring that all results are interpreted in light of evolution. It's a very powerful idea, and I think if it becomes the new paradigm, the benefits for society will be unreal. You're also oversimplifying the golden age of microbiology. Germs had been observed centuries before Virchow and Lister brought microbiology and hospital sanitation by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek. There was a raging debate at the time between the majority hold-outs who clung to the "humors" theory of medicine and the new-school people who instead suggested that there could be other causes for diseases (or infectious disease, but this was not yet a solid medical concept). Plenty of evidence existed for germs AND for their link to diseases for decades before a shift to sanitation occurred. You're describing a time where there was a very smudgy grey area between the old guard and the new guard of theories of disease, not unlike how things are now with dietary fat. My point here is not to quibble history but to demonstrate that science is a slooooow-moving body, and that's relevant to our discussion. There are suns with less intertia than your average scientist. Despite the fact Lister and Virchow had such wild success with their hospital sanitation methods, they were still met largely with disdain and skepticism throughout the medical community for most of their careers. And they were right the whole time. You're misunderstanding my position. The whole of my side of the debate wasn't encapsulated in my response to those studies you cited. I really just made a single point with respect to those studies, and that was that I am very familiar with those types of studies, and I don't trust them as a way to make dietary recommendations for the reasons I cited in my previous post. You know there's more to my side of the debate than that. I'm also not suggesting that "correlation does not equal causation" DOES negate an entire field of study. I am saying that making recommendations from correlations alone is weak science, and I think I made the reason for that perfectly clear with my analogy in the previous post. Correlations are a STARTING POINT for mechanistic science. "Oh, it looks like these two things are related. Let's find out how." is the way to go. Not "Oh, it looks like these two things are related. Avoid A to avoid B." That's just, well... lazy. A billion studies showing pirates are related to global warming doesn't mean they actually are related. Quantity of evidence is one thing in science, but quality is another. Cakes and cookies prevent chronic disease, right? My position is not merely one of negating the work of others. What about the studies I have cited myself which present contradictory evidence with respect to those you presented? What about tying theory to practice? Being coldly scientific is "good" from an analytical standpoint, but on a practical level, you can't wait to have 100% of the information that exists on a something to make a decision about how to proceed with it. No one has complete information for anything, ever. Results on diets like Paleo are nearly universal, and clinical trials are being performed now. Some are actually on PubMed NOW, demonstrating the "paradoxical" effectiveness of a high-fat diet on heart disease markers, diabetes, obesity, etc. If I have the studies to say that what I am eating is probably not going to harm me, my blood lipids and vitals are excellent, I feel amazing, my results have been long-term, and I have been able to reproduce these results in 100% of my friends (so far) who have tried this method, why should I be even a shred unconfident in my position even if there's some big, scary studies which tell me animal fat is bad? I've cited to you many studies which support my contention. I could cite many, many more, but that would be superfluous at this point. My position isn't unfounded, it's just unpopular. And wildly effective. And man, do I love Oscar Wilde's quote, "Everything popular is wrong."

The short answer is that these studies do not indicate what the quality of the beef utilized is, nor do they correct for confounding variables. It could be the shittiest feedlot beef there is. Also, these sorts of "food log" studies which track consumption of only one particular food miss crucial details like which foods people tend to eat WITH, say, red meat vs. chicken. In America, most people who eat "healthily" (by a conventional definition) would eat things like chicken preferentially, and they would also probably eat few processed foods. Compare that to the easiest and most common place people source beef, fast food joints, and you have a huge list of confounding variables not considered in these oversimplified studies. There's actually a documentary called "Fat Head" which explores this idea of confounding variables in studies condemning saturated fat. He basically does the opposite of "Supersize Me" and eats McDonalds' for 30 days, but he ONLY eats the meat and really nothing else. No fries, no pop, etc., and the end result is he loses weight, has better blood cholesterol, and better blood pressure. Very interesting. I'll respond in more detail to each study later. Got school stuff going on right now. edit: And now for the long answer... http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22583051 First of all, this study is highly authoritarian. The fact they say so assuredly "Because both N-6 and N-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids are essential and reduce risk of heart disease, the ratio of N-6 to N-3 is not useful and can be misleading," doesn't sit well with me. It's a very absolute statement, and it's not really appropriate for a scientific abstract. I've already cited studies to you which say the opposite, but such is the nature of science. What I do like about this abstract, though, is this VERY powerful statement: "All lines of evidence indicate that specific dietary fatty acids play important roles in the cause and the prevention of CHD, but total fat as a percent of energy is unimportant." Wow. Love it. Is that not the opposite of everything we've ever been taught about fat? Things really ARE more complicated (or simple, depending upon how you look at it) than "eat less fat to avoid heart disease). I just REALLY don't like where they go with their recommendations after that. Their language is also, once again, authoritarian. "All lines of evidence..." Oh really? Every single study ever done has shown this one thing to be true? Bullshit. That never happens anywhere in science. These guys clearly have an agenda or no scientific integrity if they're writing their article in such absolutes. And they mentioned that three types of studies have demonstrated an adverse effect of saturated fat. None of those studies are mechanistic (exploring the process whereby something occurs. They are, instead, correlational or epidemiological. In my opinion, those types of studies are NOT reliable for health recommendations because of the potential for confounding variables. Here's an analogy. The average annual temperature has been increasing since the late 19th century. Naval piracy has been dropping since the late 19th century. If you were to do a single variable linear regression to determine how strongly naval piracy correlates to average annual temperature, you'd find that there's a strong correlation between the two. So what do we do with this information? Do we recommend that people start becoming pirates to combat global warming? NO. We recommend that further studies be done to determine HOW naval piracy causes global warming. If a mechanism can't seem to be found, then the usefulness of that naked correlational statistic should be cast into doubt. If we can't CAUSALLY relate naval piracy to global warming, should we value that strong correlation anymore? No, it's a coincidence. Same with all these correlational saturated fat studies. If you can't tell me HOW saturated fat is causing heart disease (no one can), then it probably isn't causing it. In this case, the positive correlations are likely due to confounding variables. Again, check out the documentary "Fat Head" to see how correcting for these confounding variables can lead to very positive results from high red meat consumption, even when sourced exclusively from McDonalds'. I actually remember a controlled feeding study (a type of study mentioned in the abstract) performed on mice which showed saturated fat caused heart disease, diabetes, liver problems, high cholesterol, etc. So I looked into the materials and methods for the study. The mice were fed a diet of 100% HYDROGENATED coconut oil (wtf, that is ALL they were fed?). What is hydrogenated coconut oil? Trans fat. This was a study on trans fat, not saturated fat, yet the authors intentionally did not phrase it as such (hmmm...), and the study was all over the mainstream media. Horrible science and journalism everywhere. -- http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23451121 My response to this is, again, it's a large epidemiological study. What about the confounding variables? Without further study, this is just a set of data which warrants closer investigation. Nothing more. Without a mechanism showing how grass-fed red meat causes heart disease, I'm not too concerned about data like these. Maybe in China, many people who eat red meat do so with a particular side dish or condiment which is extremely processed and dangerous to cardiovascular health. Maybe that same side dish is never eaten with chicken. Who knows. The study didn't investigate that. It's the same thing Fat Head looks at. Unlike the asshole in Supersize Me, the guy in Fat Head doesn't get a large coke and an apple pie with each McDonalds' meal. And he doesn't get fat or sick, yet the conclusion of Supersize Me was that fat is bad for you. Confounding variables. It's the sugar overdose people eat often WITH the fat from McDonalds'. -- http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21912836 "Meat protein is associated with an increase in risk of heart disease." -- Associated? Cool. Show me a mechanism for how meat protein causes heart disease. "Recent data have shown that meat protein appeared to be associated with weight gain over 6.5 years, with 1 kg of weight increase per 125 g of meat per day." -- 1 kg of weight increase/year per 125 g of meat eaten per day? Pretty slow increase if you ask me. I've gained 10 kg of mass and a shit ton of strength in 10 weeks eating about 175 g of animal protein per day. Sounds like this study group needs to lift harder "In the Nurses' Health Study, diets low in red meat, containing nuts, low-fat dairy, poultry, or fish, were associated with a 13% to 30% lower risk of CHD compared with diets high in meat." I hate the nurses' study. It's another huge epidemiological BS fest full of vague associations and ZERO mechanistic explanations. It confuses more than it teaches. Anyway, great, cool, where were the nurses getting their red meat? From the Wendy's in the hospital food court, and I'd like a large frosty and fry with that, thank you very much? "Low-carbohydrate diets high in animal protein were associated with a 23% higher total mortality rate whereas low-carbohydrate diets high in vegetable protein were associated with a 20% lower total mortality rate." This was probably a study done on Atkins which allows the conusmption of ANYTHING, so long as it is low-carb. A lot of the foods labeled "low-carb" found in grocery stores are highly processed and loaded with trans fats or inflammatory compounds. You just cannot blanket "low-carbohydrate diets high in animal protein" over ALL diets high in animal protein. Would a whole foods diet low in carbs and high in animal protein have the same associations with heart disease? A very important question. My take on this study is "so what?" It's just a set of raw data. A starting point for deeper investigation. No explanations. Blanket generalizations and positive statements without important follow-up questions or distinctions being suggested. So what? -- http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23001745 The findings of this study actually corroborate what I've been saying. "In meta-analyses of prospective cohorts, higher risk of CHD is seen with processed meat consumption [stats omitted], but a smaller increase or no risk is seen with unprocessed meat consumption." and "The overall findings suggest that neither unprocessed red nor processed meat consumption is beneficial for cardiometabolic health, and that clinical and public health guidance should especially prioritize reducing processed meat consumption." There's no part of this study I really disagree with except for the interpretation of their data. They are probably being cautious because a diet high in unprocessed animal cholesterol CAN raise your blood cholesterol, but it does so in a proportional manner with respect to HDL and LDL which is not known to be associated with heart disease, but it can flag on a lab as "elevated" cholesterol. Sure, but it's not "aberrant" cholesterol (low HDL, high LDL-, so there's no concern. I suspect the authors of the study didn't make the distinction between elevated and aberrant cholesterol when they found that unprocessed red meat cosumption. They also did this study on people who have type II diabetes which is a disease caused by a horrible, terrible, shitty diet. That population has a very dysregulated and sensitive metabolism, so trying to apply the effect of certain foods on their metabolism to that of a healthy population is poor science. Who knows what else the test groups are eating aside from processed/unprocessed red meat? My guess is that considering they have type II diabetes, it's probably not good. And where's a good place to get processed beef? Burger King. Might as well pick up a Coke while I'm there. For science! -- http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23388667 This study is funny. It demonstrates exactly what I was saying about how shitty epidemiological studies are. It also demonstrates that same phenomenon with naval piracy and global warming. "Higher intakes of whole-grain bread, raw vegetables, coffee and cakes and cookies were found to be significantly associated with a lower risk of chronic diseases." HMMM? So that first study was comfortable with making dietary recommendations based on raw epidemiological data (insane, but common practice in nutrition science). Imagine if the authors of this study had done the same thing. "Consume cakes and cookies to reduce your risk of chronic disease." I REALLY respect the language of this article and the fact the authors ended their abstract with questions about the validity of their study. But it also annoys me. It shows their bias. The study shows that cakes and cookies were associated with a reduction in chronic disease. So they question THAT, but not the red meat consumption? Pre-conceived notions... And here's the hellspawn child begat from the marriage of nutrition science and epidemiology: THE FOOD-FREQUENCY QUESTIONNAIRE. No wonder their results were weird. I would Google this if I were you and read critiques on this research method bearing in mind that it is what is used for the vast majority of epidemiological nutritional studies, the same type use by ALL the studies you have cited. It's really just an awful method which relies on memory, estimations, and the small set of study terms/"food groups" which the authors permit the subjects to use when filling out the survey. So much room for error and ambiguity. -- http://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/new-study-links-l-carnitine-in-red-meat-to-heart-disease-201304176083 Here's a generally solid response to the TMAO study, complete with citations of its own. Saves me a little time My only addition to that guy's response is that inflammation is a NECESSARY condition for cardiovascular disease. Without an overactive immune system (a condition I believe to be most commonly prevented by low dietary gluten, good omega 3 to 6 ratio, low oxysterol intake, low added sugar intake, etc.), cardiovascular disease is unlikely to occur even in the presence of normal dietary free radical production. It's not like TMAO is the only free radical produced by foods we eat, and that response says as much. Free radicals are a fact of life. This study is just being alarmist about TMAO. So yeah. That's a lot to read. I guess the take-home themes are that correlation is not the same as causation, that without a demonstrable mechanism there is always room for doubt of an actual causal relationship regarding even the strongest of correlations, and that the methods whereby these epidemiological studies are performed are shitty as evidenced by the results of the study I just talked about right above this paragraph.

I actually liked the narrow genre/theme restriction. It forced me to be creative and to work outside my comfort zone, and I feel like I learned a lot as a result. My vote is to keep things largely as is, but perhaps to allow for some minor additions or variations.

Draconiator just told me via PM that we are voting for 3 people, (1st, 2nd, 3rd place), so adjust your votes accordingly.

Those are exactly what I have, and I found 'em brand new and in-box for $450 on ebay. They're pretty nice.

Ladies and gentleman, the most smartest man in the universe. Just fucking write music. Don't think. It's the key to productivity and satisfaction.