Welcome to another edition of “stuff I like.” In past editions, I talked about different things that I liked, from websites, to food, to supplements, and more.
Today, I’ll highlight 5 more things that I like. Hopefully it helps you too.
Precision Nutrition
Precision Nutrition is a company started by Dr. John Berardi and Phil Caravaggio, to train personal trainers in nutrition. However, what I find beneficial isn’t actually their approach to nutrition. What they teach about nutrition is nothing groundbreaking. Basic nutrition, that you could get out of an undergraduate nutrition course.
Where they really shine is their approach to behavior change psychology. And that’s where most personal trainers seriously suck: compliance. Getting compliance out of their clients. They believe that just educating clients on food is enough to get them to change their behavior. As if people don’t already know that they need to be eating more vegetables, and protein, and less processed food. If knowledge was enough, we wouldn’t have an obesity epidemic. Knowledge isn’t enough, so we have to use certain methods to improve compliance.
Original source: here.
So I love Precision Nutrition for 2 reasons:
Reason #1: although in their certification, the approach to nutrition is nothing groundbreaking, the articles that they put out on their site are indeed groundbreaking. They are non-dogmatic, they don’t have a specific diet that they endorse, and they acknowledge that different diets and different strategies work for different people. And they are consistently high-quality articles that not only look at the scientific literature on a given topic (like how bad sugar is, for instance), but write it in a way that’s accessible to the lay person. Just like my own articles 🙂
Reason #2: human resources. I interview a lot of trainers, and unfortunately, most of the time, I’m seriously disappointed. A good chunk of my disappointment is largely due to my rigorous hiring process. However, when I see “Precision Nutrition” on a trainer’s resume, I’m much more hopeful. Probably about 40-50% of the trainers who work for me are either certified with Precision Nutrition, or in the process.
The Beck Diet Solution
The Beck Diet Solution is a book that uses concepts and techniques from cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) in order to change behaviors around food. Again, as mentioned in the previous section, knowledge of good nutrition is not enough to change behavior. You have to change psychology, habits, environment, and more, in order to undo 30, 40, 50, 60 years or more of bad nutritional habits (which is not just what you eat, but also why you eat, how you eat, etc.)
That’s where the Beck Diet Solution comes in handy. It was written by Dr. Judith Beck, who applied her training as a psychologist in CBT to the nutrition world. Basically, just about every trainer that works for me has read this book. We also often frequently recommend it to clients, and it’s been tremendously helpful to that end.
If you want to read just a single book about nutrition, this is probably the best book you could read. It doesn’t go into the nitty-gritty of nutritional biochemistry, and hormones, and all that. Rather, it gives you day-by-day homework to do, for 45 days, to change the way you think and behave around food.
Following the principles of the Beck Diet Solution is one of the reasons that we have such uncommonly high success rates with our clients.
Examine.com
Examine.com was started by a Toronto-based entrepreneur, Sol Orwell, due to his frustration at how little good information there was about nutritional supplements. Yes, there was plenty of information. But very little of it was good information. He saw that gap, so he filled it, and created examine.com.
Original source: here.
Today, examine.com is by far the biggest, and most authoritative site on nutritional supplements around. There’s no competition.
What makes it so good? A few things:
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It’s science-based. It looks at what actually works. Not what could work, or what should work, but what actually works.
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When there is not enough data, or there is conflicting evidence on a supplement, they tell you that.
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And my favourite section of every supplement: the human effect matrix. This section shows you the strength of the evidence (how many studies there are on a supplement), the consistency of the evidence (whether the results are homogeneous, or heterogeneous), the strength of the effect (whether a supplement has a strong effect or a weak effect), and all this is based on human evidence. Not mice, or rats, or isolated cells in petri dishes.
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They are unbiased. They don’t sell any supplements, they don’t do any consulting work for supplement companies, and they have no other conflicts of interest. Trustworthy advice.
So if I want to know something about a certain supplement, examine.com is the first place I go to.
It’s funny to me when someone asks me “do you believe in [FILL IN SUPPLEMENT NAME]?” They ask me as if it’s a religion. My belief is based on evidence. If the evidence is there, I believe in it. If the evidence isn’t there, I don’t believe in it. Simple as that. And examine.com presents the evidence, so it strongly shapes my beliefs about supplements.
Then, the same person tells me about their strong disbelief in a certain supplement, or in all supplements in general. Obviously, they haven’t looked at the evidence, and this belief of theirs comes from either wishful thinking, or the desire to have an opinion. After all, having an opinion makes you feel important. Even if your opinion is wrong, and there’s a mountain evidence negating your opinion. Oh well. You can’t change a person’s religion. Even if it is a secular religion. Rant over.
Nutrition Data
Nutrition Data is a massive, and authoritative database on foods, and their nutritional profiles. If I want to find out the vitamin, mineral, fatty acid, and amino acid breakdown of a given food, I can check it right there.
I use it in a number of different ways:
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Because I’m a geek, sometimes, when I’m grocery shopping, and I’m curious about the nutritional profile of a certain food, I check it. For example, I love crab. But I didn’t realize that imitation crab isn’t really crab. So I looked up the nutritional content of imitation crab. It has way more carbs than protein. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it shouldn’t be consumed as a protein source.
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Sometimes, I want to see which foods contain the highest amount of a certain nutrient. For example, one time, I wanted to know what contains the highest amount of arginine (an amino acid that helps open up blood vessels, which can have blood pressure-lowering effects). So I looked it up (the answer, by the way, is sesame seeds). And I’ll do that for different nutrients. Potassium, calcium, etc.
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Mythbusting. Sometimes, you’ll hear that a certain food contains a certain nutrient. Since I’m a “numbers guy”, I always want to know “how much?” After all, it’s the “how much” part that really tells you accurately whether you can rely on that food for that nutrient, or not. For instance, a lot of vegetarian/vegan propaganda literature tells you that vegetables are high in calcium. Things like kale, spinach, broccoli, etc. Then, when you look it up, you actually see that kale has 90.5 mg, spinach has 29.7 mg, and broccoli has 42.8 mg. You need about 1500 mg per day. Good luck getting that out of vegetables. By comparison, a glass of milk has 276 mg (and no, I don’t want to go off on a tangent about whether dairy should be consumed or not), and a can of sardines has 569 mg. That’s not to say that kale, spinach and broccoli shouldn’t be consumed. They absolutely should be. But not because of their (almost nonexistent) calcium content. They are good for other reasons.
Metagenics Ultra Calm
If you have a sweet tooth, and you want to indulge in something that’s delicious, but not harmful, Ultra Calm is your thing. It’s a bar (like a chocolate bar), but has a coconut filling, and tastes amazing.
Original source: here.
But when you look at the nutritional information of ultra calm, you see that despite tasting amazing, it’s pretty darn good for you. One bar has only 150 calories, only 23 grams of carbs, of which 8 grams are fibre, and only 60 mg of sodium (we need 2300 mg per day).
And there’s something special about this bar. A little bonus: 200 mg of l-theanine. What’s l-theanine? According examine.com (see what I did there?), it’s a relaxing amino acid that promotes “relaxation without sedation. It appears to be effective at this as well as reducing stress at standard dosages”