hackskii

You think it didnt convert well due to the fact it didnt need to?
That too much conversion would cause too much inflammation?
The body is very smart at trying to maintain homeostasis.
How was the level tested of AA to EPA, or was that not addressed?

Got news for you bro, Sears tested his diet on the Stanford University Swim team and there was marked levels of performance enhancement.
The test results were in his first book "Enter The Zone".
Good book, worth reading.
His last book was a good read too, all throughout the book he cautions about excess inflammation and AA was in that book alot.
That book is called "The Anti-Inflammation Zone"

Now for the record, I do not agree 100% with all of his work, but much of it is very promising.
I was on the Zone Diet and to be honest I got so lean I had to re-introduce way more carbs as I got pretty lean and lost no strength.
So, comming from personal expericance to some respect, pound for pound I was the strongest I ever have been in my life.
I felt fantastic too.
I dropped 25 pounds and lost zero strength if that doesnt sound hard to believe.
I am not making that up either, I have trained for 30 years.
At 37 (11 years ago), I had a smaller waist than when I was 18, I had more lean muscle mass than I was 18, I was stronger than any other time in my life.
All clean and with the use of no steroids.

I just think the area of abuse is rife with supplements and steroids, when the bottle says take one tab a day, hell most will take more. This I have a problem with if 5 pills work good, lets have 10.
Again an American diet is too high in AA anyway.

__________________
Power over others is weakness disguised as strength.

Scott

hackskii

Arachidonic acid, which is found primarily in fatty red meats, egg yolks, and organ meats. This particular polyunsaturated fat may be the most dangerous fat known when consumed in excess. In fact, you can inject virtually every type of fat (even saturated fat and cholesterol) into rabbits, and nothing happens. However, if you inject arachidonic acid into the same rabbilts, they are dead within three minutes. The human body needs some arachidonic acid, but too much can be toxic. Ironically, the higher your insulin levels, the more your body is stimulated to make increased levels of arachidonic acid.

I know that was posted before but......
What gets me is exercises uses some AA, to come to the conclusion that athletes are defficient in AA is leading.
This is one fat that does not need to be supplemented.
In light of the fact that most people are insulin reisitant, higher insulin levels, the more stimulated the body is to make more AA.

Questions for you Phosphate:

Do you feel that too much AA in the body has zero health conciquences?
If not please explain.

If one is eating foods rich in AA (like bodybuilders do), do you really feel that AA still needs to be supplemented?
If the answer is yes why not pop a couple of eggs more in the diet?

Do you feel that the typical American (not weight lifters) have too much AA or not enough AA in their diets?

__________________
Power over others is weakness disguised as strength.

Scott

Tall

Is AA contained in Eggs? Or does something happen when the eggs are digested which means a pre-cursor to AA is converted to AA?

hackskii

Silent Killer: The Link between Obesity and Type 2 Diabetes Dr. Barry Sears

CBN.com ? Obesity is one of the biggest generators of silent inflammation. Since nearly two-thirds of Americans are now overweight, this means that the epidemic of silent inflammation is also out of control. By the same token, our diabetes epidemic has grown by 33 percent in the last decade. It should come as no surprise that all three epidemics have worsened in recent years. All three are intricately connected with a condition known as insulin resistance.

Insulin resistance occurs when your cells become less responsive to the actions of insulin, forcing your pancreas to continuously produce more insulin to drive glucose into cells. This excess insulin (produced as that response to insulin resistance) also increases the storage of body fat. So the real question behind our current obesity epidemic is what actually causes insulin resistance?

No one knows for sure, but there is a growing opinion that the molecular cause of insulin resistance may originate in the endothelial cells. Endothelial cells form a very thin barrier that separates the bloodstream from your organs. If this barrier is not working very well, you have a condition called endothelial dysfunction, which means among other things that insulin can no longer easily pass from the bloodstream through the endothelial barrier to interact with its receptors on the cell surface. It?s only when insulin interacts with these receptors that the cell can take up glucose from the bloodstream. Any difficulty insulin has in getting to its receptors will keep blood glucose levels elevated. The body responds by pumping out still more insulin, now creating a condition known as hyperinsulinemia.

Obesity from a Different View
What if the epidemic rise in obesity in the last twenty years was not primarily due to the usual suspects (fast food, TV, junk food), but fueled by increased silent inflammation, which increases insulin resistance? This means that unless you reduce the underlying silent inflammation, any other approach to reduce obesity may be doomed to failure. This also means that simply restricting calories will not be enough to turn back our current obesity epidemic.

I believe that obesity starts with excess arachidonic acid (AA). You can increase arachidonic acid in the bloodstream either directly by eating too much of it (it?s particularly high in fatty red meats and egg yolks) or indirectly by consuming too many high glycemic-load carbohydrates, which increase insulin production, which in turn promotes increased AA production. Either way, the body goes to great lengths to take any excess AA out of the circulation and store it away in your fat depots in an effort to keep inflammation under control.

Here is where the trouble starts, because fat cells aren?t simply inert balls of lard sitting on our stomach, thighs, and hips. These cells are very active glands that can secrete out large amount of inflammation mediators if they?re given the right stimulus. As your fat cells become filled with more AA, it causes an overproduction of pro-inflammatory eicosanoids in the adipose (fatty) tissue.
Eicosanoids play an integral role in your health. Just ask the Nobel Prize committee, which awarded the 1982 prize in medicine for the discovery of eicosanoids. They are also the most powerful hormones, since they affect the synthesis of virtually every other hormone in your body. In a sense, you can think of eicosanoids as ?super-hormones? capable of bringing great health benefits (?good? eicosanoids), or great harm (?bad? eicosanoids), depending on which one a cell produces.

Now you can probably guess what happens. These ?bad? eicosanoids induce the formation of new inflammatory mediators that spew forth from fat cells into the surrounding circulation--and generate systemic silent inflammation.

Now before you start cursing all your fat, I want to emphasize that all fat is not created equal. Some types of fat are far more harmful than others. It depends on their metabolic activity. Subcutaneous fat--the fat that collects on your hips, thighs, and buttocks and makes you look like a pear--isn?t that harmful. It may not look too good, but at least it won?t kill you, because your body is in no rush to mobilize the AA out of these fat cells. That?s why this type of fat is considered metabolically inactive. It is primarily a storage depot.

On the other hand, visceral fat can be a killer. This kind of fat collects around the abdominal organs, such as the liver, kidneys, and gallbladder and makes you look like an apple.

How do I spot visceral fat?
You may think that the easiest way to see if you have visceral fat is to look at yourself in a mirror. But this may be deceptive, because visceral fat is often found with in close contact with subcutaneous fat in the abdominal region. The real indication of the amount of your abdominal fat that is actually visceral fat is measured by either your TG/HDL ratio or your fasting insulin levels.

Visceral fat is very metabolically active and causes the constant release of stored AA into the bloodstream. This is the last place you want excess AA, since it?s then taken up by every one of your sixty trillion cells, making each one more likely to generate more pro-inflammatory eicosanoids, and therefore more silent inflammation throughout the body.

Visceral fat is even more insidious because it also continually releases other inflammatory mediators in addition to stored AA. Two of the worst are the pro-inflammatory cytokines, tumor necrosis factor (TNF), and interleukin-6 (IL-6). TNF is implicated in creating even more insulin resistance, whereas IL-6 triggers the liver to synthesize C-reactive protein (CRP), which can stimulate your white blood cells to begin to mount an inflammatory response to a potential infection (even though there isn?t one). About a third of the CRP circulating in your blood came directly from visceral fat cells. These pro-inflammatory cytokines are produced in your visceral fat as a response the increased pro-inflammatory eicosanoid production caused by increased AA levels.

This means the fatter you are (really, the more visceral fat you have), the more silent inflammation you generate. This is the smoking gun that links obesity with increased rates of heart disease, cancer, or Alzheimer?s. Anything that increases silent inflammation is going to be bad for your future.


The Diabetes Connection
Diabetes used to be a very rare disease, but times have changed. Over the last twenty years, it has become an epidemic. Okay, let me clarify this. Type 2 (adult-onset) diabetes has become an epidemic, while type 1 (juvenile) diabetes still remains relatively rare. Type 1 diabetes is caused by a condition in which the pancreas completely shuts down and fails to produce any insulin, causing blood sugar levels to spiral upward out of control. The more common type 2 (90 percent of all diabetics have this version) occurs when the patient develops long-term insulin resistance. As I mentioned above, insulin resistance causes the pancreas to secrete more insulin (hyperinsulinemia) in an effort to reduce blood glucose levels. Eventually the pancreas (really the beta cells in the pancreas) just get tired and stop producing enough excess insulin. This is called beta-cell burnout. The result is that without enough insulin becoming secreted by the pancreas, blood glucose levels begin to raise to dangerous levels. The danger comes from two factors; (a) excess glucose in the blood produces free radicals (oxidative stress), and (b) excess glucose is neurotoxic to the brain. Hyperinsulinemia usually precedes the development of type 2 diabetes by about eight years, but they both come from increased insulin resistance. Starting to see the connection?

Obviously, not everyone who is has insulin resistance becomes a type 2 diabetic. However, enough do--there are an estimated 16 million Americans afflicted with type 2 diabetes. This devastating disease puts a person at a 2 to 4 times greater risk of dying from heart disease and also increases the likelihood of kidney failure, blindness, impotence, and amputation. Because of these expensive complications, type 2 diabetes is the most expensive of all chronic diseases, costing approximately $132 billion per year. As our obesity epidemic increases, so will the epidemic of type 2 diabetes. That?s very bad news for the health care industry.

The good news is that taking Ultra Refined high-dose fish oil to reduce silent inflammation (the molecular cause of insulin resistance) and following the Zone Diet will help reduce hyperinsulinemia (the consequence of insulin resistance) and begin to reverse type 2 diabetes in just six weeks.

__________________
Power over others is weakness disguised as strength.

Scott

hackskii

Eggs contain AA.
TH&S, read that article above, pretty brutal.
Suggests AA makes one fatter not leaner as implied with X-Factor.

__________________
Power over others is weakness disguised as strength.

Scott

diaita

well ive followed some posts but this 1s intense,great read, learning loads was looking at AA in my 6th ed, great book bill

winger

Well I did the zone diet too and got very lean and kept my strength too.

It's about ratios, some get it, some don't and some find it very confusing, but for me, best book I have ever read!

If diet is spot on, you will never look better!

Tall

Whats the basics of the Zone Diet guys?

hackskii

Lower GI carbs, but you can eat the higher ones, you have to add a fat, fiber and protein.

It is basicly 40% carbs, 30% protein, and 30% fats.
The diet limits saturated fats some, endources good oils like extra virgin olive oils, and also fish oils.
Back when I did the diet I didnt have the good fats in my diet that much, he revised it some after the first book came out to include better fats.

The diet designed for each one personally depending on the amount of lean tissue and also how much training you do.

For instance, a guy with less muscle and limited exercise would take in less of each macro, but all the macro's were calculated on protein requirements.
More muscle, more protein, more exercise, more protein, then you just figure out the macro's using the percentages above.

Last meal had pretty low calories but I did notice that every day when I woke up I was leaner. He explains how the ratio's can effect fat burning even in sleep.

Hell, on that diet you can even have a beer or two, but then you cut back on the carbs and have a protein chaser......lol
Something like if you have 2 beers, eat a chicken breast.....lol
At that time I didnt drink, I payed very strict adhearance to the diet.
In the beginning I dropped too much weight too fast as I could not stay between the 1 to 2 pound loss, so I added im more food using the same percentage of macro's.
At the end I was eating 7 meals a day and still losing weight and at this point I weighed only 163 pounds, hell I am 210 today 11 years later.
I am no stronger today than back then, sure I could go on a cycle and beat the old personal bests, but I had almost unlimited energy back then.
In the end I stopped as people were telling me I was too skinny, my vascularity was freaky.
Too bad I didnt go on a cycle back then as I would have some killer pictures.
I gotta admit tho, I was getting laid more back then than anytime in my life, older and younger women, much younger.
It looked like I was younger at the end of the diet than at the start.

__________________
Power over others is weakness disguised as strength.

Scott

phosphate bond

I can see where you are coming from (because I have read those Dr. Sear's books), but the main problem I have with his theories is that he does not address the fact that arachidonic acid is essential for proper insulin function in muscle. But then who is doing heavy labor in the "Zone"? (most people today do not lift weights or do heavy physical labor like the kind that occured 1000's of years ago)

Now if you want to lower "silent inflammation" you need to decrease insulin levels. AA is this respect helps. Like I said AA stimulates and then Downregulates cAMP (locally in muscle when released by muscle contractions). You want cAMP low in the rebound state (post exercise) because cAMP pgosphorylates glycogen synthetase and thus inactivates it. You want glycogen sythetase to be maximal if you want to lower blood sugar and store it as maximal glyogen.

Now for the record I am very optimistic about the combined use of AA with EPA/DHA (there is a specific reason why I like the combo and it has to do with the total body physiology when they are both combined). For one thing EPA/DHA have been actually shown to increase AA levels when not given in exessively high dosages. I believe this has to do with the benefical effects of EPA/DHA one one aspect of mitochondrial respiration (you absolutely need to have ATP to even get AA into muscle for example.) Yes I know what Dr. Sears says about insulin activating delta 5 desaturase, but that is not the whole story here. Insulin (in excessive amounts) also stimulates acetyl COA-carboxylase and lipogenesis (rather than ATP production) and this results in a poor distribution of any endogenously made or exogenous AA. That is probably why these folks in that Costa Rica study have so much AA as triglyceride in adipose cells rather than having AA as phospholipid on the surface on the muscle cells. Not to mention the fact that this poor ATP state results in so much release of AA elsewhere in the body. This poor ATP state is what Dr. Sears is talking about when he mentions high insulin and excessive production of bad "total body" prostaglandins.

hackskii

Wow, nice post, I had to read that more than once....lol

But again, back to square one here.
Most folks have too much AA in the body.
The drop in AA in the study was used in endurance athletes.
I do doubt there are deficencies in resistance training, hell the body can manufacture AA when insulin is high.
Many, or better said, most bodybuilders have a high glycemic meal post workout, would this not give a boost in AA post workout, due to exercise causing insulin sensitivity? Not to mntion a spike in insulin from the high GI meal?

Some guys do not even gain on X-Factor, could this be the case that they either have enough or too much AA in the body already?
If so why supplement?

What is your background, I am curious?
You write well, and dont get emotional like Bill....lol
Again I have nothing against him, I do feel he is doing what he feels is right.
Time will tell here.
Anything in excess is bad, hell even water can kill you if you drink too much and that is about as safe and necessary as it gets.

Thanks for the post, I would like this thread to have the most information for and or against the supplementation of AA on the net anywhere.
Time will tell I guess if this product is totally safe like you and Bill suggest.
Dr. Sears seems to be in direct opposite here.

Really quickly, after I was supplementing 12 fish oils a day, after a few months I noticed I urinated harder with more flow. I am 48 and prostate problems is a big fear to me (and rightly so). I feel (although I cant prove it), that it was due to PG-1 and PG-3 allowing less inflammation in my prostate, allowing me to urinate better.
The prostate has one of if not the most amount of prostaglandins in the body.
Would excess AA cause me to influence BPH in a negative way?

__________________
Power over others is weakness disguised as strength.

Scott

Truewarrior1

damn hacks don't you read the thread i posted this..

"As can be seen in Figure 1, both saturated and omega-6 fats convert to arachidonic acid in the body, whereas the meat itself contains arachidonic acid. One way that the body rids itself of excess arachidonic acid is by producing a dangerous enzyme called 5-lipoxygenase (5-LOX). New studies show conclusively that 5-LOX directly stimulates prostate cancer cell proliferation via several well-defined mechanisms.2,26,30-36 In addition, arachidonic acid is metabolized by 5-LOX to 5-HETE, a potent survival factor that prostate cancer cells utilize to escape destruction.31,37-40" thats an excerpt from the third link i posted.

bills reply was..

"The level of AA in the diet has been shown to have no impact on whether or not you get cancer. It is not a carcinogen. It is a potent growth promoter, however, and like others of this class such as growth hormone, IGF-1, anabolic/androgenic steroids should never be used if you have cancer. These agents may increase the growth of cancer cells like they would normal cells."

Tall

^^^ that means where prostate cancer cells are already in existance, 5-LOX encourages additional prostate cancer cell reproduction. This does not mean AA is a carcinogen.

So I'd say Bill was correct on that point.

Truewarrior1

read back on the thread i never claimed it caused cancer..i know what it means,he was correct that it isn't a cause of cancer,but it shows it accellerates it.

winger

This is pretty slick, lumping it into stuff that actually does work.