Killer haute dogs and Sandy's antidote

“No hot dogs.” That was at the top of the dietary advice I was given on being discharged from the hospital following my cardiac arrest in 1989.

On being 80 with a stress test

It is not for nothing that they are called waiting rooms, those rooms with chairs and old magazines at offices of doctors, dentists and in hospitals. There is extra waiting time, as I

Lazy cabbage pot dinner

Cabbage and veggie meat: is there a better dish than this?

The Haliburton, Kawartha, Pine Ridge District Health Unit offers a recipe for a meal it calls “Lazy Cabbage Roll Casserole.” I cooked a modified version I call Lazy Cabbage Pot Dinner. It’s healthier, easier to make, and tastes great.

Can you cut your risk of heart attack without using risky statins?

Can you reduce your risk of heart attack by improving your blood cholesterol, without the use of risky statin drugs?

Avocado and green tea: is there a healthier dressing than this?

Recently while watching the Doctor Oz Show on television, Joan found a unique way to consume green tea.

Steel cut oats with flax seed and fruit: the ultimate healthy breakfast?

After 65 years I learn to love porridge without brown sugar.

With no statin drugs, will this diet lower my LDL cholesterol?

Heart and cancer risks: life's a gamble

The treatment for heart-risky cholesterol levels is generally a three-legged stool: exercise, diet, and statins, a pharmaceutical. But there are risks—a risk if I kick out the stool’s statin leg, and a risk if I don’t.

Controversial food

The chaos of nutritional change, contradiction, and confusion.

Why walking is world's best exercise

Diary of an old man's long walk

How to get big gains from no-pain exercise

Run for your life. Or just walk.

How to beat the heat and humidity

An inspiring Rocky Mountains hiker, 80 years young

The sight of saturated fat

Talk of hiking boots and walking shoes

Doing what comes naturally is naturally the best way to walk

We don’t usually think about how to walk any more than we think about how to breath. We just do it. Even with our first baby steps as infants, we’re just “Doin’ what comes naturally,” as a song says. And doing something that is mechanically extremely complex, using most of our muscles and organs—brain, heart, lungs, eyes and more—in intricate actions that only physiologists understand.


There are exceptions. Military people must learn to march the way the military wants them to march. Infantry grunts are drilled to march 30, 40 or even 50 kilometres, packing heavy loads. Marathon runners give considerable thought to techniques that will help them cover the ground faster. And power walkers, too, must similarly learn the best techniques. Doing what comes naturally isn’t naturally the best way to walk, for the most effective exercise, health, or speed.

Which brings me to my subject. As I tramp into my 80th year, I think I’ve mastered the power walking technique as recommended by former Olympic power walker Mark Felton and others, and modified it just slightly to what seems to give me, at least, the best result.

In fact, I seem to have adopted three different modes of walking during three months of training, so far this year, as I prepare for a 42-kilometre power walking marathon on September 26, and a three-day 90-kilometre hike along for the Victoria Rail Trail from Lindsay to Halliburton October 9 to 11. As noted earlier, on the marathon I’ll be raising money for the Heart and Stroke Foundation, and on the hike I’ll be raising money, for Lindsay’s Ross Memorial Hospital.

Power walking I’ve dubbed the locomotive style. I’ll explain that in a minute. Power walking provides the most vigorous exercise, does the most to improve posture, probably provides the most health benefits, and is the fastest of the three walking styles. But at least for me, it seems best suited to relatively short walks. I probably won’t be able to maintain an all-out power mode for the full 42 kilometres of the marathon. I will likely alternate it with the still brisk but less energetic style I call a military march.

You don’t see soldiers punching the air with bent elbows like power walkers; soldiers swing their arms. A military march, or something remotely like it, seems best suited for long hikes, such as my planned October hike to Haliburton. It seems closest to doing what comes naturally. “You’re swinging your arms freely with just a slight bend to you elbow,” says the Mayo Clinic.[i] “A little pumping with your arms is OK.”

Gorilla-style walking is probably approved by no one, but I sometimes do it for a few minutes as I warm up when starting out, more often as I cool down at the end of a good walk, or if I’m just pooped out and need to slow down for awhile. With muscles relaxed and shoulders slouched, my arms hang straight down, dangling loosely like an ape.

I call power walking the locomotive style because of the arms. My arms don’t swing: they punch. The elbows are bent at 45 degrees, and my hands make short, fast punches, back and forth. As the hands reciprocate like some power-driven mechanical devices they drive the speed of each short step as surely as the reciprocating rods that drive the big wheels of a railway locomotive. The faster the hands and arms go, the faster the feet go. The wheels of a locomotive must turn as fast as the rods that drive them, and the legs must go as fast as the arms that seem to drive them. I find it totally impossible to do anything but keep the speed of my legs in synch with the speed of my arms. I’m sure I’d fall flat on my face if things ever did get out of synch.

Some power walking instructions suggests that the arms should be bent a bit more than 45 degrees with the pumping hands chest high. I find that wastes too much energy. It seems easier, more comfortable, and just as effective to keep the hands at belly-button level. I also have a tendency to tightly close my fists as I pump my hands back and forth—another waste of energy. I have to remind myself to keep a relaxed, open fist, thumb against index and middle fingers.

Now I’m power walking with my arms driving my legs in short, quick steps (much faster than long strides). A few more things kick it into high gear. Head up, eyes forward, not focused on the ground. Stomach and butt squeezed in. Then, with the back straight, I throw the shoulders back, and the pace seems to automatically pick up another notch.

This is the way it works for me.

None of this makes me a fast walker. After some 650-training miles I am still nowhere near fast enough to complete the 42 kilometres of the September 26 marathon in the qualifying time of 6.5 hours. At my age, I’ll likely never be one of the qualifying “fast walkers” for whom the Scotia Bank Toronto Waterfront Marathon is said to be ideal. But at least I’ll be not quite as slow as I would be without—by that time—some six months of training. And perhaps a pair of those costly featherweight walking shoes that power walkers favour will enable me to cover the ground a little faster than in the comfortable hiking boots in which I’ve been training.

At 2 pm on the Sunday afternoon of the marathon, the streets of Toronto on the route will be re-opened for vehicular traffic. Any of the anticipated 20,000 marathoners still running, power walking or limping along will have to get off the road. But unless they roll up the sidewalks, I will still complete the full 42 kilometres as quickly as I can without risking my impaired heart.

And if I can’t walk as fast as real power walkers, at least I’ll look like one.

Not that power walkers are a great sight. As my marathon-running daughter says, “Power walkers do look funny.” As I hurry along with fast tiny steps I fear I must look like an old geezer rushing in urgent need to get to the nearest bathroom.

Never mind. I’m out there doing more than just practicing power walking. I’m also practicing the Keegel. The Keegel, as mentioned in an earlier blog, is the exercise that women do after giving birth to tone up muscles and body shape. For men, the Keegel is said to be a more effective cure than Viagra for erectile dysfunction. The Keegel essentially consists of alternately contracting and relaxing the pelvic muscles. As I power walk with my stomach and butt pulled in tight, I seem to be able to also pull in my pelvic muscles by squeezing just a tiny bit harder. In fact, says the Mayo Clinic, when walking you should “Tuck your pelvis under your torso.” And from time to time I give those pelvic muscles that extra squeeze.

Thus, as I power walk, I like to think that I’m killing two birds with one stone. Which is good, as long as I’m not the old bird.

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[i]  Mayo Clinic Health Solutions. “Walk Your Way to Fitness.” Rochester, Minnesota, 2007.

Search terms: Walking; power walking; hiking; exercise; health; Scotia Bank Toronto Waterfront Marathon; marathons; Lindsay, Ontario; Haliburton, Ontario; Victoria Rail Trail; Mark Fenton; Kegel exercise; Ross Memorial Hospital; Heart and Stroke Foundation of Ontario.

Castle meals in the age of Ivanhoe

People must have been healthy in the age of Ivanhoe. Life was not poisoned by polluted air and contaminated water, folks walked everywhere and got lots of exercise. Food must have been simple and wholesome before there were trans fats and hydrogenation, and way to much sugar, salt and starch.

But were meals in those glorious castles of 14th-century "Merrie England," in fact healthy at all?

How to make tomato juice safe and delicious

Tomato juice should be just about the healthiest drink that you can drink. It’s difficult to think of many natural liquid foods that carry a bigger load of healthy vitamins and minerals. It also has more lycopene, the cancer and cardiovascular disease-fighting antioxidant than any other food. But to get all that goodness, the tomato has to be cooked, even better yet, with a little oil.

Unfortunately, tomato juice, sauces and ketchup might not be healthy at all—quite possibly dangerous to your health. That’s because most of them contain a lot of salt, the big health risk that we have been repeatedly warned about.

Labels on different brands of canned tomato juice at a supermarket that I checked said each contained 570 mg of sodium per 250 ml—a small, eight-ounce glass of tomato juice. The labels also say that this is 23 percent of the “daily value.”

That’s misleading. “Daily value” implies that 570 mg of sodium is 23 percent of the amount your body needs for the optimum health benefits of sodium. It is not, in fact, 23 percent of what you need, but 23 percent of the maximum daily amount considered by Health Canada to be safe. It is 38 percent of all that is actually needed for adults under age 50; 44 per cent of the daily amount required by adults aged 50 to 70; and 48 percent of the needs of those over 70, Health Canada says in an online article, “Sodium: It’s Your Health.”

Health Canada states: “The amount of sodium considered adequate to promote good health in adults is 1,500 mg per day,” or 1,300 for those aged 50 to 70, and 1,200 for those past 70.

Both Canada and the United States have adopted a “Tolerable Upper Intake Level” (UL) for sodium, which Health Canada says is “The highest intake level that is likely to pose no adverse health effect.” That UL limit is 2,300 mg of sodium per day. Health Canada recommends that you do not exceed that daily limit of 2,300 mg of sodium.  Yet average Canadian sodium consumption in 2004 was 3,092 mg of sodium per day—77 percent more the stated safe limit. More than 90 percent of men over age 19 and 66 percent of women consumed more than the stated safe limit.

If drinking just one small glass of tomato juice accounts for almost one quarter, then with the sodium consumed in all our other food, it would seem difficult to stay within the recommended daily maximum. A daily glass of tomato juice highly spiked with salt does not sound like a healthy prescription.

Reducing salt would dramatically improve our health, say the health authorities. A study in the Canadian Journal of Cardiology estimates that reducing salt consumption to recommended levels would prevent 11,000 premature deaths each year.

WHEN YOU MIGHT NEED MORE SALT

It might be altogether different if you exercise strenuously in hot weather for a couple of hours or more. In that case, you probably will need extra salt, says Dr. Gabe Mirkin, a former marathon runner and a widely recognized authority on sports medicine and fitness. Reducing salt consumption might save lives “for many people who do not exercise,” Dr. Mirkin writes in his online newsletter (Salt for Warm Weather Exercise, Dr. Mirkin’s eZine.) “But for heavy exercisers and athletes, particularly those who are vegetarians, it can cause cramps, fatigue, injuries, and even death.” He concludes: “If you exercise regularly for more than a couple of hours, particularly in hot weather, you need extra salt. You also need more sugar in hot weather to increase endurance.”

That might be sound advice for heavy exercisers who are as fit as Olympic athletes. But for the rest of us, two or more hours of heavy exercise in hot weather sounds like a good prescription for a heart attack or a sudden life-stopping cardiac arrest—with or without extra salt.

For my part, I hope to avoid this problem by avoiding heavy exercise when it’s hot, as I train for the September marathon and the 90-kilometre October hike. On my walks of 5- to 10-K, four times a week, I’ll start out at 6 am, when the weatherman calls for a hot day. On my weekly longer walk, perhaps I’ll have to start at 5 am. And I’ll try to keep my salt intake within the recommended bounds—in part, by avoiding highly salted tomato juice.

        

LOW SALT TOMATO JUICE RECIPE

Fortunately, it’s very easy to prepare great-tasting tomato juice that has only 10 mg of sodium per cup, rather than the 570 mg of sodium found in food store tomato juice.

This is a trick Joan taught me. We often eat a bowl of canned, diced, no-salt-added tomatoes. It contains only 10 mg of sodium per 250 ml. Joan spices it with a little plain white vinegar. Here’s how to make spiced tomato juice.

Empty a 797-ml (28-ounce) can of diced, no-salt-added tomatoes into a mixing bowl. Add 2 tablesppons of white vinegar; 1 tablespoon canola or olive oil; ½ teaspoon oregano; ¼ teaspoon each freshly ground pepper and cumin. Process in a blender or juicer.

Adding a little oil to the tomato helps your body absorb lycopene, the powerful antioxidant that helps fight cancer, heart disease and macular degeneration. Tomatoes are the richest source of lycopene, and your body absorbs very much more of it when tomatoes are cooked or processed, as in canned tomatoes, and even more with a little oil.

You’ll enjoy this spicy tomato juice that has barely two percent as much salt as the supermarket stuff.
TAGS: Tomato juice. Tomato recipes. Sodium. Lycopene. Cancer. Cardiovascular disease.