Why Stretching Is Bad For You

Pulling on a muscle for a long time doesn't make it longer, doesn't make it more pliable, and doesn't improve athletic performance. There's lots of scientific literature that shows that stretching before exercise increases the risk of injury, but still there's a lot of emphasis on it in common fitness literature. It's similar to the demonization of saturated fats: once a meme gets firmly implanted in the culture, it's hard to eradicate it. 

I wanted to share this video from Evan Oscer on why conventional stretching is bad.  I think it's worth your time to watch:

Personally, I happen to do yoga as my means of integrating my muscles and nervous system. Yoga is mentioned in this video around the 23 minute mark in a positive light. A lot of people seem to think yoga is glorified stretching, but that's evidence of a bad yoga teacher (there are many, many bad yoga teachers out there). The physical side of yoga, the asana practice, is the integration of:

1. Breath
2. Stability
3. Movement

Stability and breath are both important for reducing muscle apprehension throughout the movement.  Whenever your nervous system is unsure of whether it can support a load at the edge of your range of motion, the interaction between the muscle spindles and the Golgi organ in the tendons causes the muscle to spasm to protect itself. If you want to decrease muscle tightness and improve your range of motion, the thing to work on is improving the stability of the movement while breathing deeply and evenly, _not_ pulling on the muscle harder.The apprehensive reflex is inhibited when the body is convinced, by many repetitions, that the joint is still safe and stable even at the edge of the range of motion. This in turn allows us to be more athletic, more open, and improve our eccentric muscle control so that we can relax when muscle tension is deleterious.

Thermoelectric Breakthrough, ZT = 2.2

Recently there was a major advance reported in Nature (Biswas et al., 2012), conducted at Northwestern University (NWU), on a new high-temperature thermoelectric material. This particular material is doped and structured Lead Telleride (PbTe) and is used to produce electricity from high-temperature 'waste' heat, otherwise known as a Seebeck generator (as opposed to a Pelletier refrigerator, which is the effect in reverse).

If I may diverge for a moment, Tellurium is an element with a lot of interesting chemistry associated with it. Jim Ibers of Northwestern University wrote an interesting article in Nature Chemistry (2009) about it. It's in the same column as Oxygen and Sulfur on the periodic table, so it shares some aspects the very complicated chemistry that these elements have.  However unlike Oxygen and Suflur, it can also form distended Te-Te bonds, in addition to Te-Te single bonds, so oxidation states in metal Telluride compounds are often indeterminate (which sort of implies that Te-containing compounds can have lots of different phases with very different physical and chemical properties). 

Tellurium ain't exactly common (it's less abundant than gold, but not in as high demand) nor environmentally benign.  Also, thermoelectrics are naturally going to be employed more in high-wear, industrial environments.  Furthermore, there is competition for Tellurium from other industries such as thin-film CdTe photovoltaic manufacturers such as First Solar.

Anyway, back to the thermoelectric!  

The advance improved ZT, which is the figure of merit for the heat efficiency performance, from about 1.7 to 2.2.  ZT governs the Carnot efficiency of  the thermoelectric, and hence dictates how close to entropy-limited performance a thermoelectric material can operate.  These devices are supposed to operate from a heat source at about 750-900 Kelvin (630 - 480 °C) and dump into room temperature.  This is not low-quality heat by any means, as its easily hot enough to make steam, so there's no magic when it comes to thermoelectrics.  They still obey the laws of thermodynamics.

The basic trick here is the governing equation,

ZT = σS²/(κ_el + κ_lat)

from which we see that if you decrease the thermal conductivity, κ, you can improve the performance (electrical conductivity is σ). Thermal energy in solids is primarily conducted by phonons, which are quantized lattice vibrations (i.e. sound). Electrons carry some thermal energy as well, but at the temperature we're concerned with, it's precious little. In order to decrease the thermal conductivity, but not overly decrease the electronic conductivity, you need some structures that are phonon-sized (many atoms). Phonons have a large range of possible wavelengths, so in order to inhibit thermal conductivity you want to provide all wavelengths with something to reflect and scatter from.  Hence, the desire is to have a material that is structured/disordered on all potential length scales so there's no window for phonon-driven thermal conductivity to occur in. 

The previous body of research, that improved the ZT up to 1.7 involved nanopatterning the thermoelectric with precipitates about 5 nm in diameter. In comparison the microscale crystallites have a much broader distribution of grain sizes, but average around 1 μm (or 1000 nm).  The histograms in Figure 3 tell the story.

Figure 3 (from Biswas et al., 2012): Micro- (top) and nano-scale (bottom) structures in Sodium-doped Lead/Strontium Telluride.  The low-mag electron micrograph in (a) shows the crystal grains, while in (e) the nano-scale precipitates are seen in high-resolution transmission electron microscope images. 

It is slightly ironic, given the nanotechnology craze, that the group improved the performance first with nanostructures and then when that was insufficient, reverted to the microtechnology to further improve the performance. So the new model is to develop sexy technology first and the simple solution later? Of course there's a fairly big gap between the nano-scale precipitates and the micro-scale crystalline boundaries.  Perhaps something in the range of 50-100 nm could be added to further reduce the thermal conductivity? 

One concern I would pose is whether the nanostructures and microstructures are stable long-term at the given operating temperature.The melting point of PbTe is 924° C, but the constituents melt at much lower temperatures, so there is the potential for annealing over time.

JAMA Study on Efficacy of Vitamin D in Preventing Colds

Whether or not low vitamin D3 levels can affect how often one can get sick is an interesting line of research these days.  The notion is, we spend so much time indoors or slathered in UVB-blocking sun cream that our bodies aren't producing nearly as much vitamin D3 as they did historically before the industrial age.

A new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association treated a population with vitamin D to see if vitamin D serum levels affect how often a person contracts a respiratory infection (Murdoch et al., 2012, free access). This was a randomized, double-blind study with a placebo group, so it's a high quality study and from my reading appears solid.  75 % of the study participants were female.  The treatment method was to give participants an oral dose of 200,000 IU initially and again one month later.  They then followed that up with 100,000 IU per month for the remainder of the study, which is about 3,300 IU per day.  Personally I take 4,000 IU per day in the winter and none in the summer.

My first concern was whether or not the treatment method, large monthly oral dose vitamin D, especially because vitamin D is fat soluble, the vitamin D was given in tablet form, and there were no instructions to eat fat with the dose that I can find.  However, as shown by Figure 2, they study had no problem creating a statistically significant difference between the treatment and placebo groups.

Figure 2 (from Murdoch et al., 2012): Mean serum levels of vitamin D3 in the treatment and placebo group.  Significantly different levels were achieved in only two months and maintained throughout the study period. 

The authors found no negative effects such as hypercalcemia and no side effects from the high dose regimen.  The fact that the human body does absorb such large doses of vitamin D3 does sort of suggest that the human body really does aim for higher vitamin D serum levels then are present in the general population.

The results show that there was no difference between the high and low serum vitamin D groups on the incidence of respiratory infections or days of work missed.  So that's a big nada for vitamin D supplementation to improve immune system response against these particular viruses.  Interestingly, while the common cold was not heavily affected by vitamin D status, more dangerous respiratory infections such as influenza were statistically significantly reduced,as shown in Table 2.

Table 2 (from Murdoch et al., 2012): Infection rates by common cold associated viruses were unchanged with vitamin D status, but more dangerous flu-like viruses were significantly reduced.

Personally speaking, I fear catching the flu but a cold is barely worth noticing. It is very rare to die from a cold, but influenza and other serious respiratory infections are often lethal in immune system compromised people. The authors noticed this as well,

Of particular note, there were few cases of confirmed influenza infection among our partly vaccinated group of participants. Although adult data are unavailable, a randomized controlled trial in Japanese schoolchildren, set up to assess the effect of vitamin D supplementation on “doctor-diagnosed influenza,” did not report on that outcome but did report a statistically significant reduction in laboratory-confirmed influenza A infection (relative risk, 0.58; P = .04).

There's still plenty of reason to supplement with vitamin D, cancer risk being a big one, but the common cold does not appear to be one of them.