Unbelievable value!

When I signed up to run for Alzheimer's Research UK, they sent me a fundraising pack to help me along - full of ideas, information, and the inevitable logo'd pen and balloon.  Of most interest to me so far has been their newsletter, "think", which includes articles about the research they're funding.

A nice haircut - but is it worth as much as
2.5 hours of Alzheimer's Disease research?

What surprised me most is not how good the research is - I knew that from their website and from articles about dementia research worldwide.  No, the surprise bit of info is that their research only costs £20 per hour!  Now, what can you get in this day and age for £20 per hour?  I got my hair cut today, and that took about an hour including washing it, consultation, and so on.  The bill for an excellent salon experience?  Fifty pounds!  So that's 2.5 hours of dementia research by talented academics at leading universities, vs a one-hour haircut in a provincial salon.  Much as I like the cut, I don't feel it is equivalent in value to 2.5 hours of research into Alzheimer's Disease.   However, that's really not a reflection on the value of the cut - it's an indication of just what good value UK research represents.

[As a small aside, note the way one of my eyes looks wide open and the other is starting to close.  That's a trait that comes from my dad (the guy I blogged about last time, who has Alzheimer's Disease), and my brother and I both have it.  Often one eye is actually closed in photos, though I try hard not to as it looks a little strange.  Having said that, giving the camera a hard stare looks a little strange too.]

But back to the point.  Here is an example of research currently being funded by Alzheimer's Research UK.  The people carrying out the project had already discovered that when rats were fed a diet so high in fat that their bodies stopped responding properly to insulin ("insulin resistance"), they developed memory problems.  The current project aims to test diabetes drugs, which help the body respond better to insulin, as a possible measure to prevent memory decline.  This makes a lot of sense, given that insulin plays an important role in laying down memories, as was discussed in the New Scientist article a couple of months ago on this subject.  Alzheimer's Research UK is providing just £61K for this project - not much more than the price of a couple of family cars, but it could lead to a drug to prevent Alzheimer's - something we simply don't have at the moment.   For the cost of just a couple of cars!  Given how many people are expected to develop dementia over the next few decades, this is phenomenally good value.  Even if the research doesn't provide a prevention drug, it will give us more understanding of the relationship between insulin and Alzheimer's Disease.

So, if you click the donation link in the top right of this page, and give just £20 (25 euros, 33 dollars) to Alzheimer's Research UK, that will fund yet another hour of research - all down to you!  Go on - do it, and then pick an hour in a working day sometime in the future, and put it in your diary.  When that hour comes around, go and celebrate the research being done that you funded!

When in Rome...

...or as it may be, in France.  I was there last weekend, attending a reunion of my MBA class at INSEAD in the beautiful town of Fontainebleau.  Of course, it rained - why on earth do they hold these things in October?

You only live once.

At any rate, I had a dilemma.  We were going by train and bringing all my running kit would require another suitcase (or a bigger one at any rate), which I'd have to lug across London, Paris, and Fontainebleau.  And what should I eat?  There were gorgeous cakes, dinner menus full of things I shouldn't eat... was it going to be a complete wash out in health terms, or was I going to exercise a little willpower?

Well, I decided that I don't get presented with such fabulous food very often.  And I didn't want to carry yet another suitcase.  I settled on the happy rationalisation that it was an experiment to discover the consequences of a "weekend off".

And in some ways I've been pleasantly surprised.  Granted, I did gain several pounds, all of it as fat.  After all that food I needed a serious detox, so I've been consuming large quantities of black coffee and green tea all day, plus raw veg and unadorned fish.  By the end of the day my body was feeling like me again.  Easy come, easy go.

Moreover, I finally went for a run, for the first time since leaving for France!  I feared the worst, but in fact it was an excellent run - only slightly slower than my fastest endurance run so far, and faster than any run last week.  My legs were hurting in unfamiliar places, but apart from that it was progress rather than retreat.

I do not plan gluttonous weekends on a regular basis, but it is at least somewhat reassuring to find that skipping a few sessions and eating unwisely doesn't set me back significantly on my training plans.

Eat and run?

Ever since my son was born, I've had problems with food.  I don't mean bulimia or anything like that.  What happened is that something in my digestive system changed, and the result was that if I eat wheat or milk (plus a few other odd things like quinoa and garlic), I suffer afterwards - weird symptoms from indigestion and bloating to depressed immune system.  It was several years of continual illness before I worked out what was wrong.

So I am very particular about what I eat.  But to add to these difficulties, I recently read about ongoing research into Alzheimer's Disease, which suggests that it is actually a form of diabetes - now occasionally referred to as "Type 3".  The current theory is that a diet high in fat and sugar can destroy the ability of insulin to work its magic in the brain - where, as it turns out, it is important in laying down memories.  The scientific ideas are a little too complex to go into here, but the short version is that consuming a lot of high-GI or fatty foods is potentially disastrous for your brain.

Unfortunately, those are just the things that runners are told they should consume during training and before a race.  You get these "gels" that deliver a lot of sugar in a rush, as well as sugar-filled sports drinks, protein bars that contain lots of sugar and starch (not to mention wheat and/or milk which I can't eat), and all these things are supposed to help you fill your muscles with glycogen (rapid energy supplies) so you can run efficiently.  Endurance runners are also supposed to eat a lot of carbohydrate-rich foods like bread and pasta for an extended period before their race.

I just can't help but have my doubts.   First of all, I am no lean runner - I'm overweight (BMI 23), carrying a lot of flab around my belly where it's said to do the most harm - why can't my body use that for fuel?  Also, Alzheimer's Disease runs in my family, and I'm not keen to do something potentially harmful to my brain in the long run, even if the running does my heart and circulation good.  I don't consider brain damage an acceptable trade-off for a healthy heart.

So I've had to go to the research in hopes of some sign that there are other points of view.  PubMed makes abstracts of most medical research available to the public for free.  Although you don't generally get the full article, the service at least gives you the conclusions - it's a start.  And so I was delighted to discover  "Glyceamic index, glycaeamic load, andexercise performance" in Sports Medicine, an Australian journal.  Although the conclusions are very verbose and disorganised, they boil down to this - the jury is still out, and more research is needed.  In particular, it's not wholly clear what the trade-off is between a normal diet for an extended period, and high-GI consumption immediately before and during the race.  There are also questions about how all this relates to post-run recovery. 

My conclusion: I don't have to follow the advice on carb loading, but it would be advisable to experiment and see what works for me.  No one knows best, but experiments will at least let me test out different strategies and draw conclusions for this sample size of one.  Conveniently, this is the conclusion of a review article collecting results of a variety of articles on this topic.  We're encouraged to "let practical issues and individual experience dictate the use of HGI or LGI meals and supplements before, during, and after exercise."  Marvellous - though of course that leaves me the difficulty of figuring out what I can actually eat....