+ Breaking through the myths: An interview with fitness and nutrition expert Alan Aragon

We're very happy to present this interview with Alan Aragon, Men's Health writer, personal trainer, author, and all-around fitness guru. What makes Alan so remarkable isn't that he's so full of facts, because there are plenty of people toiling away in a lab that are full of facts. What makes him so valuable is that he's able to present this technical, scientific information in a way that's not only digestible to a general audience, but entertaining. We really appreciate his time, and suggest that you check out his website, and read his new book, Girth Control.

I was initially exposed to your work through Men's Health, but tell us a little about who you are and what you do.
I have been in the fitness industry, starting off as a personal trainer, since 1990. I've been in private practice with nutrition for about seven to ten years, depending on whether you count working with clients in the rec room of your apartment building, and I currently have a private nutritional counseling practice in Thousand Oaks, California. I also have distance clients pretty much all over the world: Japan, Australia, New Jersey, all over. When I'm not doing that, I'm writing for Men's Health, and when I'm not doing that, I'm writing a research review project that I'm going to launch in December. That will force me to stay abreast of all the research as well as offer it to the public.
The primary audience I work with are generally healthy people all the way up to amateur and professional athletes, so I cover a range of healthy to the elite fitness crowd.

Also, I wrote a book that was released in February of this year called Girth Control. It's what I wish somebody wrote when I was beginning to get interested in nutrition as it applies to fitness and exercise. It's kind of a fitness and body re-composition book- not so much about "This is how you perform better in a marathon or at baseball," but "This is how you lose fat or gain muscle. Here's all the research on proteins, fats, here's the information on all the supplements, the popular diets and their pros, cons and applications." I dedicated the whole first section of the book to gaining knowledge, and how to interpret information that you come across. How do you gain a level of expertise in the world of fitness and nutrition? How do you decipher the good information from the crap, how do you critically evaluate research? That's the foundation of the book, and what makes it unique. I teach people how to critically analyze the info out there, then I dive into it. It's available on my website.

Yeah, and that's one of the things that really challenging for people: the body of research isn't static, there's always something new coming out that could contradict what you heard before. How can people sort through all of that without being an expert?
That's a huge question. You have to ask yourself a few questions: Is this primary research that you're reading, or is it secondary information? In other words, is this straight from the investigators as it was published on a study index in Medline, or is it more of a journalistic/editorial interpretation of it? Or worse, is it just somebody's hearsay or gossip-based opinion? You have to make that judgement.
If it's a secondary interpretation, you can't really take it at face value. The only thing you can accept at face value is primary research from the investigators who did the study. Then it becomes a matter of assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the study.

Unlike other subjects, everyone seems to think they're an armchair nutritionist that will chime in with their two cents. What makes people think they're entitled to assume that role?
The field of nutritional advice is really unique, because everybody eats. Whether you're a nutritionist or not, you eat. Because of that, people feel entitled to give their opinion in a way that they don't on, say, law or engineering.

And beyond that, people have emotional and psychological attachments to their own habits. In my opinion, it's human nature to project that on others, especially if you're doing it in an altruistic sense where you say, "Well, I'll tell this person what worked for me, and we'll take it from there."

The other factor there is that it's kind of glamorous to be a fitness or nutrition expert, because then you're valuable and you get some attention. Everybody has eating issues, so if you can be known as the guy that knows a lot, there's some sort of a natural social being fulfilled there.

You made the distinction between what works for athletic performance and what works for body recomposition. Can you look at what works for athletes and extrapolate that into something that works for a general population?
The simple answer to that is, yes, if there's some sort of understanding that there will be a learning curve, and a gradual curve of progression. People get into trouble when they just adopt the competitive athlete's regimen right off the bat without any sort of gradual introduction. People do just tear the pages out of the magazine and say "This is what Dorian Yates, Ronnie Coleman, Forrest Griffin, Wanderlei [Silva] does, so that's what I'm gonna do," and that's where they run into problems.

Athletes are maybe doing the nutrition thing, at best, 50% correct if they're well read. The danger zones are that athletes typically don't get enough bone-building nutrition, and some athletes that are vegetarian lack iron, zinc, B-12, things like that. But athletes that are not well-read in the nutrition realm, they really don't do it right. A lot of athletes get to where they're at in spite of what they do, not because of what they do.

"Worrying about how much fat you burn during exercise is just as silly as worrying about how much muscle you build during exercise. Exercise is a stimulus for adaptations afterwards, it's not a time to make the changes while you're doing it."

You also have to take into account the genetic component, and the athlete's ability to withstand a protocol rather than thrive on the optimal one. There's a lot to consider. I'm not going to say that most athletes don't know what they're doing, because they have a better natural instinct and are in better touch with their bodies that most people, but you have to keep in mind that maybe 50% of all athletes are really setting themselves up for failure in the long term because of improper nutrition.

Is information overload an issue for athletes too?
I don't think so. Athletes are often very obsessive about what they do, so if they take an intense interest in the nutrition side of things, they'll either read up or hire someone like me to coach them through it. It ends up integrating into their program pretty nicely, but athletes who have just randomly chosen a protocol, things will start to show their ugly face in the long term. And that's a problem in at least half the athletic population.

On that note, one of the things you wrote that I really enjoyed was your "Myths Under The Microscope" piece on low-intensity cardio. Can you tell us about that, and what it means?
This is the basic idea: People have mistakenly come up with this idea of the "fat burning zone," where if you train with any more intensity than a low to moderate pace, you're tapping into other bodily fuel sources other than your stored body fat. And while that's true, to a certain degree, the fat that's burned during exercise is really an insignificant part of losing fat over a period of weeks or months.

The majority of fat that you lose comes in between your workouts. So, your workouts should be looked at as triggers for what happens in the other 22 or 23 hours in the day. The objective of using bodyfat for fuel isn't really conducive to increasing cardiovascular or muscular fitness. When you increase your ability to exercise productively, then everything else falls into place.

You can also think about it this way: Worrying about how much fat you burn during exercise is just as silly as worrying about how much muscle you build during exercise. Exercise is a stimulus for adaptations afterwards, it's not a time to make the changes while you're doing it. That's a completely misguided objective.

Everyone wants to look like a sprinter, and sprinters never train in that low zone, and they never train fasted. That's something to think about. Nobody wants to look like a marathoner, but the common dogma is to train like one. There are other variables, but I think that illustration is solid.

"People need to scapegoat certain foods just like they need to glorify the magic bullets."

One of the other things I liked a lot was your article in Men's Health "Five Food Rules To Break." How do myths like this get started, and why do they persist so long?
People need to scapegoat certain foods just like they need to glorify the magic bullets. Like dietary fat is easy to point the finger at, because it's fat- and people want to avoid fat. Human nature is to simplify things as much as possible, but like you said, things aren't always simple.

Like with dietary fat, you can indeed try to go as low fat as possible. Avoid bacon, avoid ground meat, avoid dark meat, cream, sauces, dressings, and so on, but then you run into problems too. For example, if you don't take in enough fat, you won't be able to produce a normal level of testosterone. If you never take in the healthy fats- avocado, fish oil, nuts- then you're not protecting yourself against cardiovascular disease.

But back to the question, these myths come up because, first of all, people try to oversimplify information that's inherently complex. That's why I have a career, because I have enough nerve to sift through all this information, and get to the truth.

The second reason is that people want to blame stuff. Carbs are the devil, fat used to be the devil. It's only a matter of time before people point the finger at something else. There will be a cyclical finger-pointing between carbs and fat from here until eternity.

Well you pointed out in your article, even protein gets a bad rap- people think it's bad for your kidneys.
Actually, you're totally right. Protein gets the stamp of, "You're going to get osteoporosis and your kidneys are going to fail." That's a myth that's perpetuated by the conservative, clinical community. The fact of the matter is, if you don't get enough protein, your bones will suffer. Getting enough protein is just as getting enough calcium. There's synergy between protein and calcium intake that's the best possible thing for bones. It's complex: people ask "protein or calcium," when the answer is that both acting together synergistically is optimum for bone health.

Why do they persist? I have this theory that the better your physique, the dumber you are. I'm kidding, because I know lots of smart guys with great physiques, but people just listen to folks with great physiques. We're visual animals. We put all our stock in the guy with the six pack and the veins. People haven't been taught to question everything, that it doesn't matter how awesome looking the guy that's telling you this stuff is. They go through the path of least resistance.

As a culture, or even a species, we love tradition. We love the status quo. We just take things at face value. It's kind of cynical way to look at human thoughts, but it's my guess as to why myths persist.
The other reason they persist is that people can succeed on a lot of suboptimal things, nutritionally speaking. The myths don't have an immediate way of revealing themselves as false, because people can scrape along and tolerate suboptimal protocols. They don't reveal themselves on an immediate, acute, catastrophic basis like the world of medicine. There aren't a whole lot of medical myths out there in comparison to food, because there's a lot of leeway.

Living in the valley, anti-aging clinics are something you've probably come across. What do you see as the future of hormone replacement therapy.
With proper physician care, and with a regular, frequent, diligent monitoring of key indicators- cardiovascular health, especially- conservative dosed hormone replacement is not dangerous. It really does improve a lot of the general health indexes of people who are basically getting beat up by age. So, there is science to that, and there is a certain degree of health benefit to be gained from sustaining optimal levels of hormones- testosterone in particular.

I think it will boil down to a philosophical decision of whether you want to go au natural and not put the Rogaine on your head, so to speak, or whether you want to let nature take its course. I really don't know what the level of mainstream interest is in the hormone replacement therapy thing. I would imagine that a lot of the more affluent populations in Southern California, for example, would be more prone to trying it. I just don't see a mass of people pouring into the clinics, although I haven't looked at the statistics as far as that industry's growth rate. I can only throw my opinion out that people aren't generally open to the idea of messing with themselves hormonally.

For women, though, the whole HRT thing is almost a given: Menopause happens, it's estrogen replacement therapy time. With men, it's not really a socially acceptable thing to say that when your testosterone drops, it's time to get your injections. A lot of that is because male hormones are totally abused by certain populations to the point that there's this unshakable taboo, and it tends to overshadow the safe practices of HRT that do exist, and do improve people's health, performance, body composition, outlook on life, and everything like that.

Well that's about all I have. Is there anything you wanted to add?
I just want to say that anything is learnable. The ability to examine the strengths and weaknesses of research is completely learnable. You read the intermittent fasting thing I wrote, right?

Yeah.
Well, there was this internet community that really latched onto this one study that showed that one meal a day gave better body composition results than three meals a day. But when you look closely at the method they used to measure the results, they used a consumer scale that you might have.

"Scientific research is not bias-free. It's not free of financial interests. It's not free of study design flaws, and it's not perfect. But it's the best tool that we have for getting closer to understanding the way the body works, the way that nature works."

Like the ones you get at Wal-Mart for $20?
Yes. It's called "bio-electrical impedance," and it's just notorious for being inaccurate. Especially when you're looking at a group of subjects where there will be major body water and hydration measurements doing on. So people should be more skeptical. Skepticism of fitness and health information is your best weapon. Be motivated to investigate.

Scientific research is not bias-free. It's not free of financial interests. It's not free of study design flaws, and it's not perfect. But it's the best tool that we have for getting closer to understanding the way the body works, the way that nature works. You can bash science all day long- that this study was funded by the dairy council- but science beats the hell out of hearsay or personal anecdote.