Daily Supplement
• When I lecture to students and residents, I usually discourage the use of multivitamins. When studies control for healthy user bias (people who take vitamins are usually healthier in the first place), multivitamins don’t offer much benefit. Companies use the wrong amounts of ingredients: high quantities of the cheap ones, small amounts of the expensive ones, cheap versions of important things like magnesium.
• I created a page on practiceofwellness.com with compiled thoughts on a daily supplement. Taking material for many places, including the Perfect Health Diet authors (amazing book), I narrowed the list down to the most important nutrients that are often deficient in even a well-balanced diet, while also being very low risk for toxicity.
PW Daily
• I practice Lifestyle Medicine at Integrative Health Specialists (IHS), an office in Middletown. We worked with a company to create personalized supplements, and we now have a Practice of Wellness supplement: “PW Daily.” I spent a lot of time choosing the ingredients, and it has everything one would need on a daily basis other than potential individualized nutrients. The only cluster of vitamins I didn’t include are the activated B vitamins, because there are several and all come in the Integrative Therapeutics supplement we recommend for most patients.
• PW Daily has just about everything we need on a daily basis, depending on goals. Here are the ingredients: Vitamin C, D3, K2. Iodine, Magnesium glycinate, Zinc, Selenium, Copper, Chromium, Ginger, Turmeric, and CoQ10. No pressure to use this supplement, but read the above post and consider the ingredients when you are thinking about supplements to take. Anyone who wants to try it can stop into IHS.
Snacks
• Quest makes low carb Cheezits now. If you haven’t had Quest chips, check them out, not for everyone. And Popcorner’s has a lower carb, high protein product.
Stay Hard
• David Goggins, the Navy Seal, Air Traffic Controller, Army Ranger, ultramarathoner, has a new book called Never Finished. At first I wondered how much he could build on his first book, but Never Finished goes deeper into his mental toughness methods. He reflects on his upbringing and his mother’s resilience. But he also tells great stories about overcoming injury (and surgeries) and completing insane 200+ mile runs. Hard for most of us to make any excuses. He really is an engaging writer who basically taught himself how to write.
The last shall be first
• Read this concise 8 page post, a book review of Tom Holland’s 500 pager Dominion. I haven’t read Dominion yet, it is taunting me from my desk right now. The review focuses on the unlikely and sometimes counterintuitive way that Christianity molded society, allowing for powerless people to succeed, helping to eradicate slavery, promoting women’s rights, even bringing about secularism.
Boost your VO2 Max to live longer
• VO2 max (also maximal oxygen consumption, maximal oxygen uptake or maximal aerobic capacity) is the “maximum rate of oxygen consumption attainable during physical exertion.” Basically, how hard can you push it when exercising. You can get a formal, lab VO2 Max right here in Louisville at a place called Fitness Insights of Louisville (they also do DEXA scans to show you body composition, visceral fat, bone health).
• Peter Attia talks often about the impact on longevity when you have a higher VO2 Max. People in the highest 20% of fitness have about an 18x less risk of death compared to people in the lowest 20%. But the greatest jump in death benefit comes when you move from the bottom 20% to the next level, the second quintile!
• You are probably wondering how to work on this, how to get more fit using this metric. Do I jog, sprint, bike, row, walk more, lift weights, etc? I would say do all of those of course, but we have some science on the most efficient way to increase your VO2 Max – this meta-analysis on VO2 Max trainability and high intensity training. Here is a pretty solid summary quote:
“The conventional wisdom is that intervals of 3–5 minutes are especially effective in evoking increases in exercise capacity. Consistent with this idea, the nine studies that generated the biggest increases in VO2max (∼0.85/min) generally used intervals of 3–5 minutes and high intensity continuous training. Additionally, many of these studies presented either individual data or ranges for VO2max values pre and post training, and inspection of this data suggests that a marked training response was seen in all subjects.”
• So get out there and run or bike or row or walk as hard as you can for four minutes at a time. Rest and repeat. Do that a few times a week.
Quotes
Live as if you are living for the second time and had acted as wrongly the first time as you are about to act now.
– Victor Frankl
Take the cold bath bravely… Make yourself do unpleasant things so as to gain the upper hand of your soul.
– Not Goggins, this was WEB Dubois!
