Outdoors
Bike City?What You Eat
There's bad news, and then there's bad news.
OU's Professor Deborah Bemben found in a recent study that cyclists, especially serious ones, are subject to more bone loss than might be expected for people of their age and activity level. In a study featured in the Los Angeles Times, she shows that the problem may be lack of lifting. Biking and swimming, as she points out, are very good exercises because they have almost no impact, but they may not be so good for maintaining bone density.
The article is in Medicine -- Science in Sports -- Exercise 41 (2) (2009), pages 290-296. Near the end we read, "The results of this cross-sectional study along with findings of previous research in cyclists present an alarming observation for bone health in what would seem to be very fit and healthy athletes."
The lesson is not just moderation, though that is certainly good advice. The people with less dense backs biked hours a week, so they were not your casual cyclist or even your weekend 40-K people, but those who biked long distances daily. The lesson is also for diversifying what you do, and pushing up weights and doing other kinds of exercise, so you're not avoiding exercising your back only.
That is the first bad news. The second is like unto it. I happened across an interview with a nutritionist from France. And naturally I supposed that everyone in France would be on the Mediterranean diet and so really healthy, and all that red wine and virgin olive oil would be cleaning out their arteries. But no, the expert leaked, the French are not eating their vegetables. It seems too much butter and cream by themselves, without the broccoli underneath, is not so good.
So again, diversity in eating, as in exercise, is better than an all-whatever diet. This of course is sensible. But sensible is not always easy. We like what we are used to, from 50-mile bike rides to cheese-only snacks.
The final bad news comes from the September 20 Tulsa World. The Center for Disease Control announced that no U.S. state or district meets national goals of everyone eating two or more servings of fruit and three or more servings of vegetables a day.
The percentage of people who manage that feat is lowest in Mississippi, and Oklahoma is the second worst. I'm not going to get all defensive about our Southern Culture, but we also cannot keep on arguing that good eating is a Yankee plot. True, the states with the highest, but still below recommendations, consumption of fruit and vegetables included the District of Columbia, Vermont, Maine, Hawaii and New York. And at the bottom of the list we join South Carolina, Alabama, but also Kansas, hardly a hotbed of Southern cooking. I wonder, though, if the new edition of The Encyclopedia of Southern Culture volume on "foodways" should include a disclaimer about the health value of what is depicted within.
Bikers and eaters should beware that diversity is good for you. And probably even necessary.
Dan Snell has commuted by bike to OU for 26 years. A couple of times a week he may bike farther. He has eaten every single day.
- Outdoors
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For the unlearned, old age is winter, for the learned, it is the season of harvest.
--Hasidic saying
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