Sometime last week, I discovered more than 1,000 unread emails, dating back to February. I knew I'd had problems with that particular email account, but I was under the illusion that somehow those emails were either getting through to me or bouncing back to their authors. In the latter case, I figured whoever was trying to reach me would either send it to one of my other accounts or find another way to contact me.

But it wasn't like that at all. I found emails from friends, family members, editors, my daughter's soccer coach -- people who know my working email address but hadn't realized their notes were going to the other one.

Then there were the messages from readers, many of whom wouldn't know how to contact me any other way. I take pride in answering almost every question I get from readers, but here were hundreds I'd never be able to answer.

There were also hundreds of offers from total strangers interested in extending my manhood, but deleting those was small comfort compared to the sick feeling I got from knowing how many people out there now think I'm a total dick for not responding to personal notes they'd gone out of their way to write.

And it gets even worse: I'd been wondering why some people hadn't answered my emails to them, and in some cases thought they were rude or dismissive for not at least acknowledging my attempt to make contact. Alas, almost all the people I'd wondered about had, in fact, returned my emails, usually in personal and frequently expansive ways. 

While I was working through that problem, I was also working on something else, which is the point of this post:

Starting July 7, I'll be editorial director of T-nation, working with Tim Patterson, TC Luoma, Chris Shugart, and all the terrific contributors there. Most of you reading this know that I've done books with Ian King and Chad Waterbury, both of whom were popular T-nation writers when I first came across their work and got fired up by their unique approaches to strength training. (Another of my coauthors, Alwyn Cosgrove, started writing for T-nation after he'd already become well-known.)

So this is a logical step for me. I've always liked the site and admired its creators and authors, and now I'll get to work wtih them on a daily basis.

The only downside is that I'll have to move on from Male Pattern Fitness. Don't worry -- it's not going away. A new author will take over in July, and I'm sure you'll enjoy his take on fitness-related news and events at least as much as you've enjoyed mine. (Assuming you have enjoyed mine; I can't imagine why you'd read it if you didn't, but I guess anything's possible.)

I'm not completely finished as a blogger. I'll be writing for T-nation, and there may be a blog-like format involved. But I doubt if I'll be writing much that's tied to the day's news. 

One reason, of course, is that I don't want to compete with my successor at MPF. But the bigger reason is that I think I've said just about everything I want to say in this area.

This incarnation of MPF is only a year old, but before this I blogged on my personal site for more than three years. (I actually launched an early version of MPF on menshealth.com in 1983, which was just a bunch of links and has long since disappeared.) I noticed in recent months that I was referring more and more to my previous thoughts on almost every blog-worthy subject that came up. Worse, when I read through my older posts, I realized I was going backwards -- I'd written longer and more insightful posts two or three years ago than I was writing now.

Still, I pass the torch at MPF with some sadness. I've had an extended Internet friendship with many of you, going back to the original fitness message board at menshealth.com, and continuing with MPF and the forums at JP Fitness. You've bought my books, starting with The Testosterone Advantage Plan, and, even more important, you've actually used them to improve your weight, health, and overall fitness.

On the bright side, it's not like we're going to be strangers. (Especially now that I know how to find emails from my prodigal account.) I've never been shy about sharing my thoughts, and I'm sure I'll express plenty of them in the articles and posts I write for T-nation. But I really appreciate the fact you read those thoughts here, responded to them, and shared your own. I would've burned out long ago if not for the feedback from and interaction with MPF readers.

Thank you for everything, and by all means let's keep in touch.

I got a big kick out of this story in today's New York Times:

A new study that looked at the physical characteristics of about 5,000 Arkansas inmates found that most were athletically fit when they entered prison. The researchers referred to them as mesomorphs.

Here's the study's abstract. The thing that jumps out -- which the Times notes -- is that the researchers used body-mass index to determine fitness. And since BMI is a blunt instrument, measuring the ratio of weight to height without taking into account body-fat percentage of athletic ability, a study like this is hard totake seriously.

Maybe the full study makes a good argument that criminals are more likely to have certain physiological characteristics than non-criminals. We can all imagine why it would be a liability for a criminal to be overweight or underweight. And the researchers make it clear in the abstract that they aren't attaching any causal mechanism to their findings -- clearly, there's nothing about being built a certain way that predisposes one to criminality, especially considering that falling within the acceptable weight range is probably an advantage in any profession.

But you can't beat the entertainment value of a study like this. If nothing else, it turns some stereotypes upside down. The massive mafiosi and emaciated crackheads are apparently in the minority of the prison population. Good to know.

I spent most of Father's Day weekend getting scorched in the mid-June sun watching my 10-year-old daughter's soccer team win three out of five games in their season-ending tournament.

I also took my almost-8-year-old daughter to a birthday party late Saturday afternoon.

In between soccer games on Sunday, I spent an hour figuring out why our family's computers couldn't get online access. (Turns out, the provider had server problems, which was actually a relief because if it had been a problem at my end there's almost no chance I could've fixed it.)

My 12-year-old son gave us a break from shuttle duty, since he spent most of the weekend camping with his Boy Scout troop. But we'll make up for it this week with three karate lessons.

I don't say all this to complain. I actually enjoy the kid stuff as much as anything else I do. I love watching Meredith play soccer, even though in terms of ability she's not even close to the top players on her own team, who in some cases aren't close to the top players on rival teams. I love watching my youngest, Annie, in her dance recitals. (Watching her play soccer wasn't fun, but that's just because she stopped enjoying it this season, which will be her last.) And I enjoy the rare chances I get to watch Harrison do something he enjoys, like playing violin in the middle-school orchestra.

I also don't say any of this to give myself a pat on the back. I'm just doing the same things I see other parents doing, and I don't feel like I'm doing anything particularly noble or even interesting. (Sorry about the not-interesting part, by the way.) I get excited when I can do things for my kids that my parents couldn't do for my siblings and me.

My friend Kevin Mitchell once joked that the only standard we were obligated to reach was to do a better job than our own parents. Since every kid believes his parents sucked at child rearing, it's really not a particularly high hurdle. My parents sucked in both cruel and comical ways, but from what I know about their upbringing, they improved upon their own parents by a wide margin. And at the same time they did me a favor by giving me so much room to improve on their standard. I, in turn, am giving my kids ample opportunity to do even better.

It may take us 20 generations, but eventually we'll get a Ward Cleaver or Cliff Huxtable in our family line.

Which brings me to something I read in this morning's New York Times:

Addressing a packed congregation at one of the city’s largest black churches, Senator Barack Obama on Sunday invoked his own absent father to deliver a sharp message to African-American men, saying, “We need fathers to realize that responsibility does not end at conception.”

He went on to echo a famous Chris Rock routine: Don't get too excited about graduating from eighth grade -- you're supposed to graduate from eighth grade. There's a difference between accomplishments and baselines. Graduating from high school is a baseline. Graduating from college is an accomplishment.

More to the point of this post-Father's Day post, spawning children is a biological baseline. Raising children better than your own parents raised you is an accomplishment.

How? Some lessons I got from my own parents:

Laughing at yourself is okay; being a laughingstock isn't.

Since I write about exercise and nutrition, I have a perfectly fine reason to stay in shape. But my interest in fitness goes back to my childhood, and growing up with an obese father when hardly anyone we knew was that size.

If my dad had acknowledged his size and been comfortable with it, it wouldn't have had the same impact. But, to tell you the truth, I don't think he looked in the mirror and saw a fat guy. He just didn't see what others saw. I, on the other hand, saw the looks he got from friends and strangers, and I heard the giggles and wisecracks.

My wife thinks I'm too vain, but when you grow up knowing people were laughing at your father behind his back, the last thing you want is to be the dad that your kids' friends make fun of.

It's also why I try to be the first to make jokes about the things that set me apart, like my age, hairline, or lack of athletic skill. I don't mind being bad at something -- I hope it sends a message to my kids that it's okay to have fun at something even though you aren't any good -- but I make sure people know I'm in on the joke. If what I'm doing is laughable, I want to be the first to laugh.

There's a difference between lies and bullshit.

My dad sold insurance, and had a gift for bullshit. He could also lie without hesitation or remorse. Unfortunately, he wasn't a particularly good liar, and I don't think he could tell when people stopped believing him.

We all need some bullshit to get through the day, and to help others do the same. You can't go through life being brutally honest about everything. If you don't drive yourself to suicide, you might have that effect on someone else.

But a lie is a lie. Lies help the liar with reckless disregard for the impact the untruths have on others. 

You can bullshit your kids about their looks or their performance, and you can allow them to have their own bullshit if it helps them get through the day with their pride intact. But you can't lie. You can't tell them they're good at something if they suck, or that your selfish actions are somehow their fault. The harder it is to tell the truth, the more important it is to sack up and say it.

Under no circumstances can you tell your kids how they compare to someone else's.

Here's one of the worst stories I can tell about my dad:

When my younger brother was a good but not great player on his high school football team, my dad started hanging out at a local bar with other football dads. One night he came home and announced that another kid's dad had gotten a standing ovation when he walked into the bar because of the way his son had played in the most recent game.

He looked at my brother and said something along the lines of, "When do I get my standing ovation?"

I don't know what kind of sickness pervaded that group of local drunks, inspiring them to celebrate a guy because his kid was a gifted athlete. Whatever it is, I hope I never catch it. I'll high-five or fist-bump a parent when his or her daughter scores a goal, but I'd go into therapy before I succumbed to the notion that I was cheated as a parent because I don't get as many boo-yas as someone else's dad. I was so far below average as a player that the fact one of my kids is actually above average at sports feels like a cosmic bonus.

On the other hand, I see a few dads who were accomplished athletes but have to sit and watch their kids struggle to keep up on the field. That, I think, would be a lot harder than it is for me to watch my kids' ups and downs.

But most of the time, the parents who were the best athletes have the most athletic kids, which is exactly how the system is supposed to work. My wife and I were good students and mediocre athletes, and if we expected anything substantially different from our kids we'd be delusional.

I resented the shit out of my parents' frequent use of "why can't you be like ..." I had nightmares about not measuring up to other people's kids that I still remember. Even as a child I knew I'd never say something like that to my own children.

So those are my three standards for being a better parent. What are yours? 

This column, by David Brooks, tackles an obvious and depressing problem in our society today:

The United States has been an affluent nation since its founding. But the country was, by and large, not corrupted by wealth. For centuries, it remained industrious, ambitious and frugal.

Over the past 30 years, much of that has been shredded. The social norms and institutions that encouraged frugality and spending what you earn have been undermined. The institutions that encourage debt and living for the moment have been strengthened. The country’s moral guardians are forever looking for decadence out of Hollywood and reality TV. But the most rampant decadence today is financial decadence, the trampling of decent norms about how to use and harness money.

Brooks goes on to point the finger at some flagrant sources of fiscal excess: payday lenders who charge usorious interest rates; state-run lotteries that function, as Garrison Keillor once said, "as a tax on people who aren't good at math"; college students who carry an average of four credit cards by the time they graduate.

Some of the numbers are certainly shocking (a family that makes less than $13,000 spends about 9 percent of its income on lottery tickets, on average), but to Brooks' credit he avoids the "stupid poor people" line of attack. Even smart people are actively encouraged to do stupid things with their money, like refinance mortgages to take equity out of their homes, make needlessly risky investments, or just buy expensive things they don't really need.

Case in point:

I used to get a subscription to Smart Money magazine through one of my employers. The magazine ran a story one month on "must-have" gear for new parents. I'd written several articles about baby gear, and I knew from experience what you do and don't need, and how to shop for the things you really must have.

So I was stunned to see the magazine's complete disconnect from my own reality. I'm working off deep memory, but as I recall, the magazine showed the most expensive options for strollers and things new families actually should have, along with pricey versions of things no one really needs.

You have to hope that people reading a magazine with the words "smart" and "money" in the title wouldn't use a magazine article as a shopping list. But I remember being surprised at the disservice to readers. For starters, virtually everything a new parent needs can be picked up in great condition in second-hand stores for a fraction of the listed retail price. (Anything you buy new is going to look second-hand within a week anyway, so why pay full price for seven days of shininess?)  

But there's more to the debt crisis than stupidity, usury, and profligacy. Even people who play by the rules get sucked up in moutains of debt. (Mike Dixon, a friend and classmate from grad school, wrote here about the toll of student loans on teachers like him.)

Which brings me to the big question of the day: Does financial stress interfere with your physical health and well-being? According to this report, the answer is yes:

Among the people reporting high debt stress in the new poll:

* 27 percent had ulcers or digestive tract problems, compared with 8 percent of those with low levels of debt stress.

* 44 percent had migraines or other headaches, compared with 15 percent.

* 29 percent suffered severe anxiety, compared with 4 percent.

* 23 percent had severe depression, compared with 4 percent.

* 6 percent reported heart attacks, double the rate for those with low debt stress.

* More than half, 51 percent, had muscle tension, including pain in the lower back. That compared with 31 percent of those with low levels of debt stress.

I don't have time this morning to look under the hood and make a call about the poll's methodology. (The news report says it was a nationwide telephone survey of 1,002 adults, with a margin of error of 3.1 percent in either direction.) But I will say that it rings true in my experience. Back in my fiscally irresponsible youth, I had more time and energy to train, but ended up with more injuries, particularly in my back and shoulders.

My own ignorance about training was probably the biggest culprit, but I can't rule out the stress of living paycheck to paycheck and being one accident away from financial calamity for years on end.

How about you? Has your physical health improved with financial success? Has your health suffered when you've been under financial stress?

It started a few months ago, with my 12-year-old son asking general questions about weight lifting. Then, a few weeks ago, he started asking specific questions about abdominal exercises. Finally, yesterday, when we were waiting for his piano lesson to begin, he got down on the floor of the small sitting room and starting doing sit-ups and push-ups.

Even though I write about fitness, I pride myself on not pressuring my kids to do any of the things I write about. They aren't sedentary, they're all still skinny, and my wife and I still have enough control over their diets to maximize fruits, vegetables, and lean protein sources while keeping fast food and other bad things to a minimum.

So, in terms of overall health and fitness, things are going fine. Harrison, our oldest, hadn't found a sport he cared about, but as long as he was active, we didn't see any reason to worry about it. He didn't complain about tagging along to his sisters' soccer games and dance recitals, and we didn't complain about not having a third set of sports activities to work into the ever-more-complex family calendar.

But then came this interest in muscle conditioning, followed quickly by an interest in martial arts. We enrolled him in a local school, and I watched him work with the instructor for the first time last night. It was like watching a whole different kid from the one my wife and I have been raising the past 12 years. The boy who'd never had an instinct for or interest in anything repetitive was practicing kicks and punches with focus and intensity. When the instructor corrected his form, the kid with no muscle memory remembered how to do it.

Will it last? I have no clue. All I can say with certainty is that it was his idea, and it'll be up to him to decide how far he wants to go with it. If I'd pressured him into it, I can't imagine that he'd have this kind of interest.

That brings me to an interesting story in yesterday's L.A. Times about something similar: how to know when you're ready to make major changes in your life. Reporter Jeannine Stein interviewed several weight-loss specialists, one of whom said this:

"I'm a specialist, so when someone makes an appointment to see me, they're ready. But then I see other people who are told by their physician to see me. When I ask why they're here, they say, 'I don't know, my doctor sent me,' and I know they're not ready."

Obvious? Sure. And yet, doctors still send him patients who clearly aren't ready to do what it takes to lose weight.

Another weight-loss specialist said this:

"For people who have been successful at losing weight, something happens in their life that triggers an 'aha' moment. It could be having the doctor tell them that if they don't lose weight, they're going to die. I don't know if you say, 'I'm ready,' but you feel like you can't go on like this."

She adds that being 100% prepared isn't always a prerequisite. "Even if you're not ready, see if you can make some lifestyle changes that are doable. If you're a couch potato, go for a walk, do something that you like for 15 minutes. Once you see some benefits -- you're sleeping better, you have more energy -- then maybe that will give you a spark, and hopefully that will lead you to say, 'Now I'm ready to be more serious and I'll step it up.' "

That last part, I think, applies to all kinds of changes we make in life, including those that aren't triggered by anything consequential or negative. It could be as simple as taking up a new hobby or, in my son's case, showing interest in an exercise system that involves repetitive practice -- something that he's avoided since he was a baby who lost interest in anything after one or two tries.

So here's the question: Among the health and fitness activities and practices you've consciously adopted -- exercise, clean eating, weight control, smoking cessation, etc. -- what was the trigger?

Do you remember the moment when you said to yourself, "I've got to clean up my act" or "Hey, that looks like something I could get into"?

And was there ever a time when someone told you to start or stop doing something, and it actually worked?

You all know I'm a pretty serious seamhead. The baseball draft, which took place last Thursday and Friday, commanded a shocking amount of my attention at a time when I should've been focused on tasks of far greater importance to my life and career.

My Cardinals had a pretty simple and obvious strategy in the draft's early rounds: Get some hitters, preferably guys who can play a position besides first base. (The current guy should be around for a while.) They took college third basemen in the first and fifth rounds, a high-school shortstop in the third round, and college second basemen in the ninth and tenth rounds. Since we're talking about baseball, it would be a successful draft if one of those guys turns out to be a legitimate star and one other makes it as a better-than-average starter. If three of them become major-league regulars, it would be considered one for the ages.

That's one of the reasons why I was so intrigued to see this news scrolling along the bottom of my TV screen last night: Cuba's top teenage player, third baseman Dayan Viciedo, had defected to the U.S.

My first thought: I hope the Cardinals pay whatever it takes to get this guy.

As Michael Lewis explains in this Vanity Fair article (which I assume is an excerpt from an upcoming book), Cuba's best ballplayers never defect to the U.S. in their prime:

There may be no entrapped pool of human talent left on earth with the dollar value of Cuban baseball players. “I compare Cuba to the Dominican Republic,” says Phil Dale, an Australian who played in the Cincinnati Reds’ organization and now scouts players in the Far East for the Atlanta Braves. “But the Cubans are better. Their island has bigger and stronger athletes.” Their island also has more people -- 11 million to the Dominican Republic’s 9 million. There are now more than 1,700 Dominican players under contract to U.S. professional baseball teams -- compared with just 40 Cubans -- and close to 100 are playing in the big leagues. Back in the old days, before Cuba was closed for business, it supplied more players to the major leagues than all the other Latin-American countries combined. ...

But relatively few Cuban players have left their island and almost none of the best. What has come to the U.S., instead, is a rattlebag of players past their prime, players in political trouble, players injured, and players who were never very successful in Cuba. Orlando “El Duque” Hernandez escaped by boat in 1997, when he was in his early 30s, and became a star with the Yankees -- but he had spent most of his prime in Cuba, and insisted that he never would have left had he not been banned from baseball by the Cuban government because his half-brother, Livan, had fled Cuba two years earlier. ... Rey Ordoñez, who spent seven years as the starting shortstop for the New York Mets, left Cuba in 1993 only after it became clear that he was blocked by better players from starting for his Cuban team, the Havana Industriales.

At least one guy, however, isn't convinced that Viciedo is really all that. (It's worth noting that Lewis writes extensively about Viciedo's team, its manager, and its star center fielder without even mentioning him.) Here's John Manuel, editor in chief of Baseball America:

Viciedo, born in March 1989, is listed at 6-foot-1, 210 pounds, but reports are that he was bigger than that last year at the World Junior Championship in Mexico. Viciedo has excellent power and hitting ability, however, with one scout comparing him to Giants prospect Angel Villalona. He slugged over .500 two of the last three seasons in Cuba’s Serie Nacional, its top-level league, hitting 14 homers in 2005-2006 -- as a 16-year-old -- in his best season.

"His body could go the same route as Livan Hernandez, and when I saw him in Mexico, he wasn’t very good at third base anymore," one international scouting director said. "But he can really hit; in fact, I think he’s probably a better hitter than Villalona."

Villolona received a $2.1 million bonus from the Giants in 2006 and is currently playing for low Class A Augusta.

Another scout who had seen Viciedo was less enthused about him as a player, pegging him as a first baseman-only hitter with a bad body. "You know everybody liked Kendry Morales," the scout said, referring to the Angels’ Cuban DH/first baseman, "and he had some other tools. But his body’s gone south and he’s pretty much just a DH. So I think it’s premature to get too excited about this guy."

How weird is it to think that a 19-year-old ballplayer might be over the hill? But when we're talking about Cuban ballplayers who go from a totalitarian system to the land of milk and honeys, conditioning issues really do become a factor, as Lewis explains:

Nothing in their experience had prepared them for American life. One of Gus Dominguez’s new Cuban clients, Ariel Prieto, took his $1.2 million signing-bonus check from the Oakland A’s, stuck it in his jeans, and ran them through the washing machine. Eddie Oropesa, awed by the size of American refrigerators, bet a fellow player he could stay inside one for 15 minutes -- and might have suffocated if Dominguez hadn’t opened the door and found him shivering. Latin players were just then flooding into American professional baseball, but these Cubans weren’t like the others: they’d been governed by fear, and when you took the fear away they were rudderless. They ate too much and listened too little, all the while longing for their loved ones back in Cuba.

Another issue, Lewis notes, is that today's Cuban ballplayers aren't as strong as their predecessors:

The kid on the mound -- a reliever named Alexei Gil, brought in an inning ago -- has just hit 96 m.p.h. on the radar gun. He shouldn’t have that kind of heat. He’s 21 years old, which means he was 4 in 1991, when the Soviet Union pulled its subsidies. Soon thereafter, the average weight and height of Cuban children collapsed, too. The Cold War ended, and East Germany ceased to send powdered milk, heavily discounted, in exchange for lemons. The shortage of calcium expressed itself in the bones of Cuban children, including those children who became pitchers. Thus you can count among the many consequences of the fall of the Berlin Wall the temporary decline of the Cuban fastball -- and a temporary reprieve granted to Cuban hitters with long, slow swings.

All of which is a reminder of the ongoing weirdness of the Castro Brothers' regime in Cuba. Here you have a beautiful island nation just 90 miles off our shores, with a fully educated population and ballplayers worth a half-billion dollars, in Lewis' estimation. You have to think that Cuba's doctors and professors, now working for $20 a month, could instantly make real money in a free market. And the tourist revenue would be worth multiple billions.

Every time I think of Cuba, I think of what a waste of human talent it is for both sides to continue on the path they've taken for virtually my entire life.

How much of the problem is Fidel Castro's intransigence, and how much is stupid American policy toward Castro, dictated by bitter exiles? I don't know. I'm happy to read that Barack Obama proposes a change in our Cuban policy, and I hope it works. Just speaking as a baseball fan, I know my team needs some better infielders.

Monday baseball meat:

Speaking of the intersection of baseball and politics, Rob Siders sent along this intriguing profile of Nate Silver, a baseball stat guru who's applying his analytical techniques to politics:

So far, Silver's system shows Obama and McCain splitting the popular vote 50.0 percent to 50.0 percent, with Obama winning the Electoral College 274.4 to 263.6. Today, McCain runs about 10 points better than Bush in parts of the Northeast -- his strongest region, comparatively -- but it's not enough to swing any states. The Arizonan's best chance for a flip? Michigan. Obama, on the other hand, currently swipes Colorado, New Mexico and Iowa from the GOP, and is within striking distance in Indiana, Missouri, Ohio, Virginia and even Alaska. And thanks to Nebraska, where electors are awarded by congressional district, Silver even suspects that McCain and Obama could, um, tie. "Right now, Obama's losing the state by 10 points, but that's 10 points better than Dems usually do," he says. "If Obama wins Colorado, Iowa and the city of Omaha, where he's popular, it would end up 269–269 and go to the House of Representatives. Crazier things could happen." 

As someone who's followed the stat revolution in baseball (I'm proud to say I knew all about it years before reading Michael Lewis' Moneyball), I'm amazed that no one has applied the same analytical rigor to politics.

Until now, that is.

Although it's disappearing little by little, I think there's still an impression in Fitness Land that you need to do traditional steady-pace endurance exercise to be considered "fit."

My take -- which I've explored in this book and this magazine article -- is that shorter, harder workouts should boost your heart health by making your heart more responsive to the most serious challenges you could impose on it.

Now a new study offers more evidence that sprints are at least as good as jogs for cardiovascular fitness (hat tip: reader Greg S.):

Short bursts of high-intensity sprints -- known to benefit muscle and improve exercise performance -- can improve the function and structure of blood vessels, in particular arteries that deliver blood to our muscles and heart, according to new research from McMaster University. ...

The findings support the idea that people can exercise using brief, high-intensity forms of exercise and reap the same benefits to cardiovascular health that can be derived from traditional, long-duration and moderately intense exercise.

"As we age, the arteries become stiffer and tend to lose their ability to dilate, and these effects contribute to high blood pressure and cardiovascular disease," says Maureen MacDonald, academic advisor and an associate professor in the Department of Kinesiology. "More detrimental is the effect that blood vessel stiffening has on the heart, which has to circulate blood".

The research compared individuals who completed interval training using 30-second "all-out" sprints three days a week to a group who completed between 40 and 60 minutes of moderate-intensity cycling five days a week.

It found that six weeks of intense sprint interval exercise training improves the structure and function of arteries as much as traditional and longer endurance exercise with larger time commitment.

All the usual caveats apply -- small sample size, we're only looking at six weeks of training, the subjects were young and healthy (average age: 23.3, according to the study's abstract), etc.

Still, the advice to choose sprints over traditional endurance work is only given to people who're active and physically ambitious -- that is, willing to try something new and more strenuous in return for better and faster results. Age isn't a factor (I do sprints at 51, although sometimes I get halfway through the third or fourth interval and ask myself what the hell I think I'm doing), but fitness level is crucial. You don't just get up off the couch with no recent history of consistent training and start running sprints.

So the conversation about sprints vs. steady-state endurance training starts with a minority of a minority: people who exercise consistently and are willing to work harder in pursuit of more ambitious fitness goals.

Also worth noting: This study from the same research team at McMaster University, published in January, found that sprints and traditional endurance work produce similar metabolic adaptations.

The take-away message from these two studies -- assuming, again, that the study team's methods and conclusions are sound and apply to a broad population of healthy, fit people -- is that shorter, harder workouts get you to the same place as longer, slower ones. But they do it in much less time, and with three workouts a week instead of five.

That's great news for me, since I have no endurance whatsoever and have never been good at jogging. How about you?

From the New York Times yesterday:

Red wine may be much more potent than was thought in extending human lifespan, researchers say in a new report that is likely to give impetus to the rapidly growing search for longevity drugs.

One of the "longevity drugs" they're talking about is a pill containing a highly concentrated form of resveratrol, a chemical found in the skin of red grapes that may have antioxidant, antiviral, and cancer-fighting properties.

The latest thinking is that it also slows down the aging process by helping the body shift into a tissue-preserving mode.

Whenever these "resveratrol is magic!" stories pop up, the fine print usually shows that you'd have to drink an entire vineyard's worth of red wine to get the magical effects. But this one is much more reasonable:

a mere four, five-ounce glasses of wine “starts getting close” to the amount of resveratrol they found effective

Since a bottle of wine is 25 fluid ounces, you'd have to drink four-fifths of a bottle every day. In other words, you'd merely have to be a borderline alcoholic to get the life-extending benefit. Progress!

I'm reminded of something Alan Aragon said in his presentation at the JP Fitness Summit in Little Rock last weekend: Whole foods almost inevitably turn out to be more beneficial than concentrated doses of their component parts.

Is red wine a "whole food"? Kind of, I guess. Still, I think it's accurate to say that interest in the potential health-promoting properties of resveratrol started with the observation that people who drink red wine have a lower risk of cardiovascular disease.

Maybe, when this line of research plays out, we'll be back where we started: a glass or two of red wine a day is correlated with a longer, healthier life ... for reasons that can't really be explained by any single component of the wine itself.

Thursday blog meat:

* My wife and I have always prided ourselves on the fact our kids had less fruit juice growing up than their peers. I don't know if they ate more whole fruit, but the only times they got juice were birthday parties and post-soccer-game snacks. One goal was weight control -- we didn't want them to get all those excess calories. Now comes a report suggesting that juice isn't linked to weight gain in kids. I think I understand why that wouldn't be the case in the data used, but I'd be shocked if it's not a problem for young children whose parents give them much more than the average amount reported in this study.

* The good news: white and black teenagers today engage in fewer risky sexual behaviors than their predecessors did 16 years ago. The bad news: Hispanic high schoolers are more likely than white or black kids to have sexual intercourse with multiple partners.

I had a great weekend at the annual JP Fitness Summit.

I was the first of three presenters. My topic was a triple geek-out on my favorite subjects: fitness, history, and politics. I explored how historical cycles not only influence our interest in health and fitness, but also the national leaders we choose -- for better and for worse.

Alan Aragon -- nutrition pro and singing sensation -- went after me, presentingsurprising and entertaining information about some hot-button topics. in his field. 

For example, he said an entry-level lifter might be able to add muscle mass equivalent to 2 percent  of his body weight per month. So a 150-pound male could pack on 3 pounds of solid muscle per month. Conversely, an advanced lifter (probably someone who's been lifting more than 5 years and is near his genetic peak in terms of strength and size) would probably struggle to add muscle equal to 0.5 percent of his body weight in a month. If he weighs 200 pounds, that's 1 pound of new muscle.

Women could expect to add about half as much muscle as men, Aragon said.

By pure coincidence, when I got back and checked my email I found a question from a reader regarding his body-fat percentage. As luck would have it, Aragon had addressed that very question. He said we only have two accurate ways to measure body fat: DEXA and dissection. (Only the first is considered appropriate for living people.)

Some people obsess over their body-fat percentage, but in reality it's one of the least important ways to measure your fitness and health, or to judge your progress on a diet or workout program. At the top of the list: how you look, how you feel, and how your clothes fit.

Aragon next tackled a more controversial topic: Is it possible for any of us to lower our body's metabolic "set point"? In other words, is it really possible to lose weight and keep it off, or will your body try to revert to its previous weight?

The key, Aragon said, is to keep the weight off at least 6 months. That's how long it takes for your behavior -- whatever you did to lose the weight -- to permanently influence your gene expression. (Some researchers have suggested that it takes 12 to 18 months.) The good news: Once your gene expression has shifted, it really is possible to live the rest of your life with a lower set point.

All of which is interesting, but vague. So let's get more precise: What specific behaviors help you keep weight off, and thus lower your body's metabolic set point?

Today's L.A. Times has the answer:

The National Weight Control Registry is an honor roll of dieters who have fought and won. Started in 1994 with modest expectations by [James] Hill and Rena Wing, director of the weight control and diabetes research center at Brown Medical School, the registry now provides some cherished data on how regular people have managed to keep weight off. The registrants, who are surveyed regularly, have maintained a weight loss of at least 30 pounds for at least one year.

Based on data from more than 7,000 people, Wing says there are few similarities in how people lose weight. But those who succeed in maintenance sing the same song.

Instead of trying to eat less for the rest of their lives to bridge the energy gap, these people exercise more. They typically spend an hour or more each day in aerobic exercise and strictly limit time spent watching television.

Physical activity, in ways that researchers don't really understand, influences some of the biological systems that promote weight regain, encouraging the body to become more sensitive to leptin and insulin, for example.

"Everyone thinks exercise is about burning calories," Fujioka says. "But you are actually returning the system to more like what it should be. Things start working again."

Once again, exercise is the answer to all the interesting questions.

Monday blog meat:

The highlight of the JP Fitness Summit -- and I think Alan Aragon would agree and not take offense at this assertion -- was Steve Cotter's presentation. Cotter is a "kettlebell guy," and the subject of kettlebells is so charged that you can start an argument among fitness professionals just by saying the word. You don't even need to add a verb or adjective. (You probably don't even need to enunciate the third syllable; given enough alcohol, "kettle" alone could start a fight.)

But Cotter made it clear he's more than that. He uses kettlebells to get desired training outcomes, but he doesn't wear one on his ring finger.

If you've seen Cotter's videos on YouTube (try this one for starters, then this one), you know he's an amazing athlete. (His background is in martial arts.) But he's also a terrific presenter, and a guy with a workout philosophy that emphasizes strength, mobility, and coordination over building muscle for its own sake.

Plus, I probably learned at least two dozen new exercises and techniques in a single afternoon. For someone who's been writing about fitness since 1992, and working out since 1970, that's really saying something.

I've been writing about strength training for so long that I find it difficult to read about it in the mainstream press. Take this story, an "online exclusive" from Newsweek called "The Four Worst Weightlifting Blunders."

The reporter interviewed Joe DiAngelo, a trainer and chef in New York city who works with an extensive list of celebrities and other rich folks. I don't know him, but as I've said about celebrity trainers in a previous post, the skills necessary to court and keep famous clients aren't necessarily those that make someone a competent conditioning specialist. 

Most of these trainers, I assume, have both skill sets -- they can get someone in better shape while also playing the role of celebrity appendage. But there's no telling which is more important to any particular celebrity-trainer matchup.

The four "blunders" are pretty simple and straightforward: "eating badly," "underestimating your strength," "trying to be macho," and "having bad form."

It's the details that kind of suck. Like this:

If you aren't eating a proper diet, weightlifting may actually make you bulgy, not buff. Combining a fatty diet with squats and free weights, for example, can make your butt look bigger. Why? Because you are building glute muscles but keeping the fat layer the same size. So the muscles will push the fat forward and the butt will look bigger. But with a healthy, low-fat diet, you'll get lean muscles and burn the fat away.

When you put it this way -- lifting will make your butt fat unless you eat a "healthy, low-fat diet" -- all you're doing is scaring people away from strength training.

You could just as easily say this: "If you eat too much for your activity level, you'll get fat." It doesn't matter if you're a runner, a lifter, or a couch fungus. You'll put on fat wherever your body tends to store it. (For the sake of my sanity and your reading pleasure, I won't touch the "low fat" part of the quote.)

The rest of the advice prattles on in much the same fashion. Don't be a wimp and lift too little, but don't be a mook and try to lift too much. Throw in the final tip -- don't have bad form! -- and readers are left with the impression that strength training makes you fat, leaves you injured, and doesn't work anyway unless you can thread the needle between lifting too little and too much, and threading it with perfect form.

So let's clarify things for the sake of online-exclusive readers everywhere.

1. The biggest weightlifting mistake is not lifting weights.

Your body will get weaker, fatter, and slower throughout life unless you reverse the aging process with serious exercise. All exercise is good, but you need to lift if you want to maintain total-body strength and muscle function.

2. The second-biggest mistake is not challenging yourself to get stronger.

Forget about whether weights are too heavy or too light. If you aren't getting stronger in your lifts over time, you aren't doing it right. (For further insight, T-nation offers this interesting take on gaining strength.)

3. You can't starve yourself and expect to achieve any benefit from strength training.

Muscles need calories to grow. Your body needs calories to recover from one workout to the next. If you're just starting out, you don't need any state-of-the-art supplements or to hit any particular macronutrient ratio. Those things might help, but every nutritionist I've met believes that the key to a healthy, successful diet is eating plenty of good food.

We all know what good food is by now -- lean protein sources (meat, fish, poultry, dairy, eggs), fruits and vegetables, seeds and nuts. I'd throw in whole grains for people who aren't severely overweight. A glass of wine with dinner is a good idea for most of us.

You can find good gyms and competent trainers just about anywhere. You can find good workout programs online or at any decent-size bookstore. I'm partial to  my  own  books, as you could guess, but I'll be the first to admit that someone new to lifting could get good results from just about any well-designed workout program.

Really, is it any more complicated than that?

Thursday blog meat:

* Scientists believe that Americans have screwed the pooch when it comes to our international reputation, primarily because of "a perceived high-level disdain for science." So there's a downside to promoting intelligent design and abstinence-only sex education while suppressing evidence of climate change? Damn! Who saw that coming?

* I'm on the road for the next three days at the annual JP Fitness Summit in Little Rock. Be excellent in my absence.

By now everybody reading this is probably familiar with the theory, popularized in Freakonomics, that legalized abortion was the key factor in the dramatic fall in U.S. crime rates in the 1990s. But as I wrote back in 2005, I've always found the lead hypothesis more compelling -- high exposures to lead in paint and gasoline helped fuel the dramatic rise in violent crime in the 1960s and '70s, and the fall in crime could be attributed to the switch to unleaded gasoline and lead-free paint.

The Freakonomics guys have tackled this issue on their blog here, without a lot of passion for the hypothesis. (Just for the sake of completeness, they wrote about the possible effect that falling abortion rates might have on future levels of crime here.)

I bring all this up because the lead-crime link is in the news again today:

Two studies showed that people with high levels of lead in childhood grew up with blocks of missing brain cells -- and they also were far more likely to be arrested for crimes, especially violent crimes.

The effect is so strong that it may account for a large percentage of crimes in inner-city areas, where old houses are far more likely to have lead paint, said Kim Dietrich of the University of Cincinnati in Ohio, who led one of the studies in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS Medicine.

"There are some data that suggest that in fact lead does run in parallel with crime trends over the past several decades," Dietrich said in a telephone interview.

The interesting finding here is that lead exposure permanently wipes out an entire section of cells in the brain, and that the damage is usually irreversible.

Then there's this:

In a third, unrelated study, a team of University of Pittsburgh researchers showed adults can be inoculated with a second wave of lead as they get older.

Writing in the Archives of Environmental and Occupational Health, Lisa Morrow and colleagues showed that lead can leach into the blood from bones as people age and lose bone mass.

By pure coincidence, I spent part of the afternoon yesterday hunting down information about how the aging brain is affected by a lack of exercise, and how that ties into falls and loss of functional abilities.

It's easy enough to say that a lack of serious exercise will lead to a cascade of problems, including loss of strength and power, a slower metabolism, a decline in balance, and smaller, more brittle bones.

But I've never considered the possibility that those shrinking bones could spill some nasty toxins back out into an aging person's blood. Could that possibly explain, in some minor way, why exercise helps prevent dementia in old age?

Or, to put it another way, could this help us understand why sedentary behavior is so strongly linked to Alzheimer's?

Wednesday blog meat:

* Also worth noting today: child obesity rates seem to be leveling off.

* A new study suggests that a person with ADHD costs his or her employer more than 20 days a year in absence or lost productivity. The news reports don't specifically say it, but I have to think employers would leap at the chance to get a few more employees on Ritalin. Now I'm waiting for the study that shows employees with ADHD who're being treated with stimulants outperform their neurotypical colleagues.

Interest in health and fitness moves in cycles, a phenomenon I wrote about on my old blog here and here. We're now at, or nearing the end of, an intense, vigorous cycle of interest in fitness and nutrition -- a period that, ironically enough, saw a tremendous surge in obesity rates.

If these things follow society-wide trends, then it would make sense to see them play out at the micro level -- among friends and family members. And, indeed, last summer researchers published a study suggesting that obesity spreads along social networks. (I wrote about that study on the new MPF here and here.)

Last week, those same researchers came out with a study suggesting that the same phenomenom occurs with smokers who want to quit. So, if the researchers are correct in their methodology and conclusions, the patterns show that people quit smoking in clusters based on their social networks -- the more unacceptable smoking became, the more socially isolated the non-smokers became. Similarly, as obesity became more normal and thus acceptable, people gained weight in patterns that also follow social networks.

In today's Washington Post, reporter Rob Stein tries to make sense of the issue:

Taken together, these studies and others are fueling a growing recognition that many behaviors are swayed by social networks in ways that have not been fully understood. And it may be possible, the researchers say, to harness the power of these networks for many purposes, such as encouraging safe sex, getting more people to exercise or even fighting crime.

"What all these studies do is force us to start to kind of rethink our mental model of how we behave," said Duncan Watts, a Columbia University sociologist. "Public policy in general treats people as if they are sort of atomized individuals and puts policies in place to try to get them to stop smoking, eat right, start exercising or make better decisions about retirement, et cetera. What we see in this research is that we are missing a lot of what is happening if we think only that way."

My immediate hunch is that public-policy decision-makers have perhaps cast too wide a net. If we're talking about social networks, then we know that certain individuals hold more important positions than others within each network. Marketing researchers know this already, and Malcolm Gladwell illustrated the phenomenon in The Tipping Point.

The key, then, is to target the most influential individuals within social networks. But how? I'll try to wonk it out a little, and then you can take over in comments.

Let's say that the problem we're addressing is obesity. First, we have to figure out who's gaining the most weight, and who's at the greatest health risk from that weight gain. Since we know that obesity is a bigger problem among the least educated and the least affluent, we probably should start with them.

If I were a marketing researcher, I'd probably want to look at social networks among blue-collar workers, and then figure out who's most influential within those networks. Coworkers? Pastors? Family members? Neighbors? Then I'd ask if the social networks are different for white, black, and Latino populations, for males vs. females, urban vs. rural, old vs. young, and first-generation immigrants vs. those who've been here longer.

Once I knew all that, I'd try to figure out how the most influential members of the various social networks get their information. TV? Radio? Church? Word of mouth within the workplace or neighborhood?

Only then would I be able to tackle the biggest challenge of all: crafting a message that's appropriate for the medium and that would actually influence the people I'm targeting.

But what if I got to the end of the process and realized there's no actionable message to deliver? I started my marketing research with the understanding that obesity is disproportionately a problem among the least educated and least affluent. What do I do if my research suggests that education and income aren't just symptoms, but are in fact the problem?

We've all heard a survival story or two about someone who survived a calamity by drinking his own urine. If nothing else, it prevents dehydration. Some have even suggested that urine has health benefits that go beyond mere survival in desperate circumstances.

Slate's Explainer column puts the kibosh on that idea:

A healthy person's urine is about 95 percent water and sterile, so in the short term it's safe to drink and does replenish lost water. But the other 5 percent of urine comprises a diverse collection of waste products, including nitrogen, potassium, and calcium -- and too much of these can cause problems. When you drink your own pee, all the stuff that your kidneys had attempted to excrete comes right back into your stomach, and much of it ends up back in your kidneys. After several days of this, your urine will become highly concentrated with dangerous waste products, and drinking it can cause symptoms similar to those brought on by total kidney failure. At that point, you're doomed either way -- from dehydration on the one hand or renal meltdown on the other. (Even if one could filter out most of the unwanted products in urine, the cycle would not be sustainable for long. In addition to what he or she pees out, the average human excretes about half a quart of water a day through sweating and exhaling.)

This is my favorite part:

Drinking urine can be especially dangerous for survivors of crushing injuries. When muscle fibers are damaged, the cells can begin leaking potassium and phosphorous into the bloodstream. Even a victim with healthy kidneys might not be able to clear the dangerous build-up; someone who had been drinking his own urine would be at much greater risk. (For the same reason, a person drinking his own urine should stay away from high-potassium foods like bananas.)

So I guess I have to abandon the idea I had for my next book: The Super-Pee Diet: Lose Weight With Potassium!

Thursday blog meat:

* A new study demonstrates that smoking is a social thing -- people used to smoke in clusters, then subsequently quit in clusters. The downside? Socially marginalized people who continue to smoke are further marginalized.

* Don't taze me, bro! Those things can kill you.

I don't associate Indiana Jones with fast food. He strikes me as more of a hunter-gatherer type than a drive-through guy. But that hasn't stopped the filmmakers who created him from tying their franchise to burgers and candy bars, and physician Rahul Parikh, writing for Salon, calls them on it:

I'm a pediatrician, and every day I see overweight kids coming into my office. Getting families and kids to change how they eat is an uphill battle, and it doesn't get easier when big studios like yours wheel and deal with companies that peddle junk food and fast food.

You tied Star Wars to Pepsi and Frito-Lay, plastering Yoda and Obi-Wan over 2-liter bottles and Doritos bags. Recently I was watching CNBC and saw the chief marketing officer of Burger King unveil the Indy Whopper, a mammoth, juicy burger with pepper jack cheese and jalapeño sauce (to give it "adventure," the CMO pointed out), a tie-in to Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. I see you also got Mars to manufacture a Snicker's Adventure Bar with coconut and chai that has Dr. Jones' face on the wrapper.

Besides the fact that none of these foods is healthy, one has to ask if they're what your characters would eat. Would Lord Vader chug down a Pepsi before he wielded his light saber? (If he did, would he drink it with a straw or take off his entire mask?) Wouldn't Indy, now a senior citizen, have more than just a little bump in his cholesterol if he had scarfed down his namesake burger with fries and a soda? How could he be fit enough to chase down ancient relics while dodging boulders and outwitting Nazis?

I agree wholeheartedly with Dr. Parikh, and I recommend reading the entire essay. But it also brings to mind a growing problem with fast food that may end up being a  good thing for the rest of us: the utter incompetence of fast-food restaurants to deliver food fast.

I should preface this by saying that I've worked more minimum-wage jobs than I can recall. A lot of them were in food service -- everything from a greasy smorgasbord in Barnhart, Missouri, to the five-star Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles.

In college I worked at McDonald's, where I came to understand how hard and thankless a job it is to flip hundreds of burgers in a single shift. I don't know how it works now, but back then the guy working the burger grill had four or five different timers whose beeps governed his actions. You miss one beep from one timer, and you mess the whole thing up.

On top of that, you had a manager who directed the volume of the burgers you flipped. In the middle of the lunch or dinner rush, you went to what was called "turn/lay," which means you threw down a new set of frozen burger patties as soon as you flipped the last set. That may have been the most profound stress-hormone-generating system I've ever encountered, because now you had those four or five timers overlapping each other. If you stopped to think about any part of the process, you were screwed.

I mention all this because I think I understand as well as anyone my age just how hard it is to do fast food right. And, increasingly, fast-food restaurants demonstrate that they simply can't get it right anymore.

My kids love Wendy's, and I confess that in a pinch I'll settle for one of their burgers. But Wendy's never ever gets our family's order right. I shit you not: It's been years since we've gotten what we ordered from a Wendy's drive-through. And it's not just Wendy's. Our local Boston Market has gone from "erratic" to "consistently bad" when it comes to filling our orders. We never ate a lot of fast food, but now we go weeks at a time without having any.

If my experiences reflect a real trend, then the Phantom Menace of fast food may kill itself off with incompetence before it kills the rest of us off with crappy food.

Wednesday blog meat:

* The major health threat du jour: Fruit smoothies rot your teeth! The fix is pretty simple -- just brush your teeth. 

* I love this headline: "Teen sex study doubts 'technical virginity'." (If I wanted to triple the number of unique visitors to MPF today, I'd explain what the headline means.)

When Viagra first hit the pharmacies, I remember thinking, "There has to be a catch." I had just started working at Men's Health, and my colleagues and I wondered what the potential downsides could be. I'm not sure if I had this particular thought at the time, but at some point I equated Viagra with liposuction: Some of the people who got the operation or used the pill were probably ignoring symptoms of bigger problems.

Someone getting lipo might have problems that could be (and probably should be) addressed with diet and exercise. But what about the guy who needs Viagra to pop wood? Soon enough, doctors began to talk about some of the problems commonly associated with erectile dysfunction, including heart disease and diabetes. If someone can take a pill to change a licorice whip into a meat stick, there's less motivation to deal with the underlying medical issues that kept Chubby from inflating in the first place.

So it's not surprising to see this new report:

Findings from two studies of men with diabetes add to the evidence that erectile dysfunction can be a powerful early warning sign for serious heart disease.

A Hong Kong study of 2,306 men with diabetes but no signs of heart disease found that those with erectile dysfunction at the start were 58 percent more likely to have a heart attack or other major cardiac problem over the next four years than those with adequate sexual function.

And Italian physicians who followed 291 men who had diabetes and early coronary heart disease for four years reported similar numbers -- those with erectile dysfunction were twice as likely as men without the problem to have major adverse events, including strokes.

Here's why this information matters:

"These reports add two things to what we already know," said Dr. R. Parker Ward, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Chicago, who led an earlier study linking erectile dysfunction with heart disease. "One is that they indicate the importance of erectile dysfunction in diabetic patients in terms of predicting future cardiovascular events. These studies suggest that the additional presence of erectile dysfunction places them at incrementally higher risk. Secondly, they show that even when considered in combination with traditional risk factors, erectile dysfunction offers incremental information about the risk of future cardiovascular events."

As it happens, this seemingly unrelated story appeared right below the one I just highlighted on the Google News search engine this morning:

A Catholic priest has filed a restraining order against the parents of a severely autistic 13-year-old boy in an effort to keep him from attending the church in Bertha on Sundays.

The Rev. Daniel Walz alleges that Adam Race's unruly behavior endangers others who attend the Church of St. Joseph.

There's no real connection here, except it made me think back to my own Catholic upbringing. Typically, families in our parishes had more kids than you could count on one hand. In other words, not a lot of erectile dysfunction going on there. I think the credit goes to the tradition of telling young Catholics early and often about the evils of sex. The more you condemn it, the more enticing it becomes, and soon you have entire generations of male Catholics thinking about sex all day and ejaculating as many times as humanly possible at night.

Of course I'm mostly just joking here -- I assume Catholic men have as much ED as anyone else. (And I'd hate to be the one who had to decide whether or not an autistic teen can attend Mass, no matter how disruptive he is.) But on the bright side, those frequent ejaculations do seem to have long-term benefit to the furtive wankers who induce them.

So there's that.

Tuesday blog meat:

* Most people talk about losing one's marbles as if it's a bad thing. Not necessarily.

* Presidential health: It's too important to leave to the president's personal physician.

My two daughters share a room, where they sleep in bunk beds -- older daughter on top, younger daughter on the bottom bunk. Here's how they started the morning when I went in to wake them up:

Younger daughter, to me: "I had trouble sleeping last night because my belly hurt."

Older daughter: "Did not!"

How 'bout those reflexes? All she had to hear was "trouble sleeping" and she automatically went on the attack, assuming she was being blamed for something.

As it happens, I had just clicked on this story when it came time to wake them up:

Women who are stressed about money, relationships and other problems during pregnancy may give birth to babies who are predisposed to allergies and asthma, U.S. researchers said on Sunday.

The findings, presented at a meeting of the American Thoracic Society in Toronto, suggest a mother's stress during pregnancy may have lasting consequences for her child.

"This research adds to a growing body of evidence that links maternal stress such as that precipitated by financial problems or relationship issues to changes in children's developing immune systems, even during pregnancy," Dr. Rosalind Wright of Harvard Medical School in Boston said in a statement.

Wright and colleagues found mothers who were the most distressed during pregnancy were most likely to give birth to infants with higher levels of immunoglobulin E or IgE -- an immune system compound -- even though their mothers had only mild exposure to allergens during pregnancy.

Studies in animals have found that a mother's stress amplifies the effects of allergen exposure on the immune system of the developing offspring. The Harvard team set out to see if they could find the same in humans.

This makes sense to me given my family's history. My older brother was born in 1955 in the hospital at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba, while my father was serving with the marines. That was two years after the start of the Cuban Revolution; Fidel Castro was released from prison a couple months before my brother was born.

As you can imagine, that would be somewhat stressful for a young mother who's pregnant with her second child. And my brother ended up having a lot of problems with allergies and asthma as a kid.

Which brings me back to my daughters, and a question left over from the research:

Is it possible for the process to work in reverse? Can kids who create stress for their parents give the adults more severe allergies than they already have? I feel an attack coming on ...

Monday blog meat

* In praise of (natural) trans fats.

* Apple and grape juice may prevent arterial blockages. I guess that means they're slightly better for you than packets of granulated sugar.

Rob Siders  sent along this hilarious look at seven pieces of fitness equipment being sold to consumers. All seven are, bottom line, basic things we all have sitting around our homes.

My favorite is the Bender Ball, which the author, Glenn Thompson, describes here:

A recent trend in fitness has been the emphasis on developing core strength. A popular way of doing this is to perform exercise movements while balancing yourself on a ball, which forces various muscles to help stabilize you. The Bender Ball is a tiny version of the bigger ball that you can already find a typical gym, and it apparently gives you ridiculous abs and a sports bra.

(You have to check out the video  for that line about abs and a sports bra to pay off.)

Read the whole thing for pure entertainment value, and then use the Comments to share your own ideas for useless and obvious fitness equipment based on stuff you have gathering dust in your basement.

My big idea is the Squat Stick. It's just a broomstick for overhead squats , but I think the profit margin would be fantastic.

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This site uses a system called "Mojo" to try to keep the comments as high-signal as possible. All users can rate all comments, except their own, between 1 and 5. When your comments are rated by others, those ratings are combined into a weighted average (newer comments count more than older ones) called your "Mojo". This, roughly, represents the rating we could expect your next comment to receive based on your past comments.

Users who have a mojo greater than a certain minimum, and who have posted a sufficient number of comments, such as yourself, for example, are considered "trusted" users, and have the added capability to rate comments below the normal minimum rating, and also to see comments rated below the minimum (they are hidden from normal users).

This is a great responsibility for you. It means you've earned the right to peer-review content from untrusted users, and determine if it is spam. We rely on you to rate as much as you can, and to keep the comments as high-signal as we've all come to expect.

Please use your "zero" rating with care! It is *only* for use on comments that are wholly content-free. If you think the poster is clueless, or an idiot, or you just don't agree with them, that is *not* grounds for a zero rating. Zero is for comments that are offensive, script-generated, or otherwise content-free and intended solely to annoy and/or abuse other readers.

Please do not rate duplicate comments 0! As virtually all duplicate comments are accidental, this unfairly impacts the poster's mojo. A "1" rating and an email to %%local_email%% notifying us of the duplicate (please include direct link to the comment) is the appropriate response.

You also have a duty to read comments posted by untrusted users (you are the only ones who can!) and rate them up if they deserve to be viewable. We hate to see users become untrusted, and want them to rejoin the community, and rating them up when they post good comments is the only way for that to happen.

It is a cruel irony that those who are trusted, in any context, usually have more work with no particular reward for that work, and that is the case here as well. You still post with no initial rating, like a normal user, and your ratings do not carry any extra weight or power. The big reward for being trusted is that you get to see the bottom-of-the-barrel dreck. But basically, someone has to do this, and you have shown the rest of the %%sitename%% readers that you have the responsibility and perception to be trusted with this task. Hopefully there are enough of you that no one person will have to expend any unreasonable efforts.

Thank you for contributing to %%sitename%%, and for taking on the mantle of responsibility for keeping the site as high-quality as you've helped make it. I, and all the other readers, salute you.

This site uses a system called "Mojo" to try to keep the comments as high-signal as possible. All users can rate all comments, except their own, between %%rating_min%% and %%rating_max%%. When your comments are rated by others, those ratings are combined into a weighted average -- newer comments count more than older ones -- called your "Mojo". This, roughly, represents the rating we could expect your next comment to receive based on your past comments.

Users who have a mojo greater than a certain minimum and who have posted a sufficient number of comments are considered "trusted" users, and have the added capability to rate comments below the normal minimum rating. If enough of a user's comments are rated below %%rating_min%%, that user becomes "untrusted", which means that respected members of the community have repeatedly indicated that your input is offensive, content-free, or merely intended to annoy others.

If you are untrusted, then your comments are posted with an initial rating equal to your mojo. Since this is below the normal rating minimum, these comments are not visible to any but trusted users. They may, if they choose, rate your comments above the minimum, and make them visible to others. You may earn back the trust of the community simply by posting worthwhile comments, and not spamming.

Please do not see this as a condemnation of you as a person. We're sure you're very nice once we get to know you. This merely means that perhaps you've posted some rather ill-considered comments, and the community as a whole has decided that we'd rather have your input peer-reviewed before it goes out to the general public. Next time you post, think carefully about what you're saying and whether it adds to the topic at hand. If not, there are plenty of places on the web that don't filter input at all, and would be glad to hear whatever's on your mind.

If you believe your posting history does not warrant an untrusted rating and you have been the victim of malicious rating, then please contact us at %%local_email%%. Think carefully, and review your previous comments before you do this. If you complain and have in fact been spamming, then I will not be pleased with you. If your untrusted rating is unjustified though, then we will deal with the situation.

Thank you for reading %%sitename%%.

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