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The above figures are how much diabetes is costing the health services of Northern Ireland and Wales respectively. (I don’t know how the £55,000 per hour was calculated, but if you multiply that by 24 hours in a day, it comes out at well over a million pounds too). Reports by Diabetes UK, and Diabetes UK Cymru claim diabetes is one of the biggest health challenges facing the nation.

Iain Foster, Diabetes UK Northern Ireland director, said: “Diabetes…causes more deaths than breast and prostate cancer combined. But how avoidable is diabetes? Correct diet, correct activity and exercise levels are key, obviously, but how easy is it to know what constitutes ‘correct’?

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Now here’s a multi-faceted concept that is of interest to runners. The big picture includes areas like eating for optimal energy, how to lose fat if that is an issue, how to put on muscle, if that is an issue, and of course how to eat for optimal general health. Which ought to be, but sometimes isn’t, an issue.

The nutritional establishment - the people who hand out qualifications in nutrition, and to whose tune you must dance if you desire said qualifications - label whatever falls outside their orthodoxy as ‘fad diets’. It is a mocking, scornful label, highly judgemental. ‘Fad’ means something short-lived and whimsical, in other words, something that is momentarily attractive, but which, due to some inherent failing, has a short life. Deeley bobbers. Power beads. Mood rings. Clackers.

Food is subject to fads too, whether it’s gadgets or diet. My mum had a ‘chicken brick’ in the 1970s, which was an earthenware two-part cooking pot, cleverly designed to sit in the cupboard gathering dust. At the same time there was a fad for putting raisins in curries (it was thought to be more ‘authentic’, I think). Eating tubloads of grapefruit for weight loss was a fad that lived and died, as was the cabbage soup diet.

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Regular running on its own is no guarantee of a healthy cardiovascular system – we have to make sure that our dietary habits are on a par with our exercise habits. You know, no transfats, no processed foods, no sugar, that sort of thing.

But despite exercising regularly, many people can still get to middle age with atherosclerosis due to their dietary (and drinking!) habits.

It seems that there is a plant that can not only slow down arterial clogging, it can actually reverse it. One of the oldest medicinal herbs in human history is garlic. A recently discovered Egyptian papyrus dating from 1,500 B.C. recommends garlic as a cure for over 22 common ailments, including lack of stamina, heart disease and tumours. As we know, garlic will ward off vampires. Ancient Cr0-Magnon cave paintings discovered recently in the Pyrenees depict a man holding his nose as his mate breathes garlic all over him. (That last one might not be true).

A 1981 study of the diets of 15 countries concluded that nations with higher garlic consumption had lower rates of heart disease, so the ‘deterrent effect’ of garlic is obviously very useful, and probably fairly well known. But what may come as more of a surprise is that garlic has been shown to reduce arterial blockage in subjects who were suffering from 80% arterial blockage. As is the way with these things, those subjects were not humans - rabbits, in fact. But the same researcher then ran a two-year study on 432 humans with heart disease, and the garlic-consuming group fared much better than the control group.

So the message is clear. Eat plenty of garlic, and you will run your way to a healthier heart. Oh, and don’t forget to stock up on fresh parsley too. A quick munch on a few leaves can kill off the garlic whiff.

Part 2: ‘rules’ 6 - 10.

We looked at 5 ‘rules’ of running last week, and showed you an alternative view. Here are five more pieces of received wisdom about running that we think shouldn’t be swallowed without looking at the list of ingredients first, so to speak.

1. ‘Get your gait analysed.’

We say: This ties in with the running shoe advice that we pooh-poohed last week. Pronation does not mean you have feet created by Satan himself, it is perfectly natural. If you are largely sedentary, spend most of the day in shoes, walk exclusively on perfectly flat surfaces like office floors, shopping malls and pavements, then the chances are you need to strengthen your feet. But if you get your gait analysed and are told you do ‘x’, and it is a problem - unless you buy shoes specifically designed to stop ‘x’ happening - then you are taking a pill to deal with a deeper issue. Poor gait is postural, and down to foot and ankle strength too. Once you have good posture, a strong core, strong feet - you will run with a gait that will not be a problem.

2. ‘Rest every 4th week’.

We say: Even the pros, who train like… the pros, don’t always do this. We hear it a lot, and we would never advocate training without incorpaorating adequate rest and recovery. But for most weekend warriors, training takes up such a small proportion of their otherwise undemanding lives that we think a whole week off is to miss an opportunity to get in another key workout that will make you a faster runner. Onwards and upwards - who knows how high you can go?

3. ‘Eat and drink carbohydrates‘:

We say: carbs before, carbs during, carbs after a long run. Live on sugar, why don’t you? If you live by the sword, you’ll die by the sword. Keep giving your body sugary handouts, and that is what it will exclusively run on – this is a harbinger of long-term doom.

4. ‘Avoid weights - you’ll bulk up’:

We say: if bulking up is your aim, and you know how to do it, then yes, you will bulk up. What runner needs pecs like Arnie? Leave the heavy bench presses to gym bunnies. But if you mainly run, and you supplement your training regime with some well-chosen weights work then it can truly enhance your running. And your slightly increased muscle mass will induce a swifter basal metabolic rate, which in turn will help consume excess fat. Sounds good. And I refer you to Lord Coe, whose wiry, lean and muscularly defined frame owed much to the weights room.

5. ‘Build up mileage to get fitter’

We say: this is most certainly not the only progressive way of training, although it seems to be one of the most dogmatic. A strong alternative view is to build up time at threshold. Week 1, four runs, total time at threshold 20 minutes as part of a tempo run. Week 2, same mileage, but build in more threshold time in another ‘aerobic’ run, or add a little to your tempo run. A few additions to time at threshold will mean tha ove a month or six-week block you’ll have significantly increased time at threshold without changing the miles run. And we think this will result in faster race times for most distances.

Happy running!

Part 1, ‘rules’ 1-5.

There is a lot of dogma out there. Assertions that are not in themselves untrue, but which may not be appropriate. Received wisdom passed down but lying unquestioned. So we thought we’d look at some things that are regularly flung around the running community, often regarded as ‘rules’, and present the alternative view. We’ll look at 5 ‘rules’ we think you can break today and the other half next week, so stay tuned for a bit of controversy?

Rule 1 - ‘Get shoes for your running style - motion control, or support, or neutral, etc’.  This is one of the biggest pieces of dogma out there. Go onto any forum where beginning runners ask for advice and this ‘rule’ is invariably trotted out.

We say: the vast majority of shoes are over-engineered, and lead to chronic foot weakness, which in turn places extra stress on the hips and low back. Research tends to show a link between  shoe technology and injury rate ie the ‘more’ shoe you have the likelier you are toget an injury. We say less is more! Pay less, get less shoe - a basic model, or racing flats - and make your feet do a little work for a change.

Rule 2 -  ‘use a heart monitor to gauge your effort’ - eg for tempo runs and races

We say: what’s wrong with RPE - rate of perceived exertion. Learn to rate your effort on a scale of 6 - 20, or 1-10 (Borg’s scales), and get in tune with your body, using the most sophisticated super-computer in existence (it’s in your skull!) instead of obsessing about some numbers on a display on your wrist. Hydration, temperature, nutritional status and different fitness levels can all, as eminent coach Jack Daniels observes, play merry hell with your HR readings. As does ‘arousal’, the amount of adrenalin coursing through your veins, which is of course a major factor in a race.You can’t really rely on them as an accurate gauge, so in effect RPE is just as accurate. Plus you get the benefit in a race of not having to worry if ‘your numbers’ are ok - there are none.

Rule 3 - ‘use a heart monitor to gauge pace’ eg for interval training

We say: subtly different from rule 2 above, and there’s a clue in the rule name - pace is best judged according to pace. A set of 400m reps run at a given heart-rate may be a good work-out for a given energy system, true, but pace is pace. You want to run a 40 minute 10k? Then you have to run to a certain pace, not a heart-rate, and you have to run to it in training. That’s not to say there won’t be a correlation between pace and the numbers on your monitor -and if there is a close correlation, doesn’t that mean you can ditch the monitor and use the real-world measure of how long it takes you to cover a certain distance?

Rule 4 - ‘build up mileage before introducing speed work’

We say: most weekend warriors need speed more than endurance. Speed is a precious commodity; it is an evanescent and ephemeral entity, and needs to be carefully nurtured and preserved. Endurance is slow to take its leave, and decent deposits in the training bank return decent interest.  So, as Coe (not sure if it was Seb the runner or Peter the coach, although it sounds more like dad) said, ‘If speed is the name of the game, never stray too far from it’. That means doing something to allow your legs to turn over quickly all the time; every week.

Rule 5 - ‘make sure you stretch before running’ .

We say: research seems to show that muscles lose their capacity to produce force after a strecthing session. Research seems to show that stretching sessions before running in no way diminish propensity to injury. Let’s be clear - we are referring to traditional ’static stretching’, and while many clued-up coaches and athletes are avoiding this as a way of preparing for a run, it is still bandied around as dogma too. Runners are largely conservative people (?) and sometimes tradition dies hard. We are big fans of mobilisation before running.

We’ll be back with more sharp sticks in the eye f running orthodoxy next Monday. Go for a run, and question everything - including this blog!

‘Five foods that fight inflammation‘ is a post here on the Runflux blog that gets a fair few readers, and happily there is more to say on the subject. So here are five more ways of making what you put down your gullet help you chase away inflammation and soreness.

A quick point. For us runners, inflammation is always lurking round the corner waiting to pounce. Without trying your patience with a long essay on the causes of inflammation, there is one factor that is worth mentioning, and that is that most western diets suffer from having a high ratio of omega-6 oils to omega-3, in the region of 10:1. High levels of omega-6 trigger the production of little buggers called leukotrienes, that cause imflammation. Omega-6 oils are everywhere in western foods: so many ‘manufactured’ foods contain corn oil, soy oil or sunflower oil that we are swamped with the stuff. Getting that ratio back down to around 2:1 will reduce your body’s tendency to get inflamed, which is a great starting point. This means loads of coldwater fish and dark green leaf in your diet, basically, and cutting back on processed foods, and baked goods. Anyway, enough on that, you want your quick-fix list, so without further ado here are the five further anti-inflammatory foods to add to the list in the post mentioned above:

1. Nuts. Not peanuts, by the way. Walnuts are good, and also appear to have anti-carcinogenic properties. Soaking your nuts in a little water really brings out the flavour.

2. Seeds. Pumpkin seeds are good (and gentlemen will appreciate their capacity to slow down prostate enlargement); flaxseed too. Add them to salads, toast them lightly mix them with dried fruit…

3. OK not strictly a food, but a high-quality multivitamin supplement is a great way to fight inflammation

4. Probiotics, live yogurt being the obvious choice here, and other fermented milk products such as buttermilk and kefir; also tempeh and miso, fermented soy products.

5. Oil, consumed by the spoonful, drizzled on salads or in soups, or taken in supplement form – nut oils, seed oils, or fish oils as a supplement (I can certainly vouch for this!!). Olive oil is well-researched these days - this study was completed with the collaboration of the Institut of Nutrition and Food Technology of the University of Granada and the Nutrition Team of the Hospital Virgen de las Nieves, Granada. ‘Together with the Research Group, they have determined that consumption of olive oil rich in polyphenols (natural antioxidants) improves the lives of people suffering from oxidative stress, and is also highly beneficial for the prevention of cell aging and osteoporosis…. After analysing samples from 15 olive oil mills, researchers have demonstrated that olive oil is very rich in polyphenols. According to Professors Alberto Fernández and Antonio Segura, ‘as preventive substances, polyphenols help to combat any oxidative disease associated with the degenerative process’.’ And that includes inflammation!

May your joints allow you many more miles of running!

With the New Year safely behind you, you can focus on getting back to all your healthy practices - or maybe establishing a few new ones.

Plenty is written about what to eat and what not to eat. We’re going to give you a few insights into what to drink. Including alchol. Even if the thought of another drop of booze makes you heave.

1. Water: first and best. Think about the possible consequences of NOT having enough water in your system: headaches, constipation, lethargy, in the short term; and the risk of kidney stones and even (some studies show) a higher risk of heart disease. Water is essential for the smooth running of all the body’s processes - but do we really need to drink 2.5 - 3 litres per day (or whatever the media has been telling us for the last decade)? As with food, our needs for water are individual, and then depend on how warm it is, how much exercise we are involved in, how humid it is, and so on. Don’t forget that if you eat a diet high in fruit and vegetables you are getting water; and if you subsist on burgers and kebabs you are drying your gut out! Water is still your best drink, but don’t feel browbeaten to consume 3 litres a day if you don’t need it. Urine colour, which should be pale and relatively odourless, and your mood and energy levels are goo dindicators of your hydration status.

2. Wine: moderate wine consumption has long been declared healthy. London Marathon winner Antonio Pinto was alleged to put away a bottle of red a day. But hang on - most of the studies focused on heart disease, and it would seem that no causal link was found between wine consumption and low incidence of heart disease, just a relationship based on the sum total of lifestyles that included red wine. Many red wine drinkers live lives that promote heart health in general terms; when studies that look at death rates are included, it would seem that drinking NO alcohol is best. Our tip is to drink as little as possible, but not to stress about cutting it out altogether - as runners you are already likely to be living healthier lifestyles.

3. Fruit juice: a bad choice. Most commercially produced juice is very high in sugar, very high GI, with the attendant surges and troughs in insulin; mostly reconstituted from concentrates, so lower in nutrients than freshly-squeezed juice. If you must drink juice - and we think you shouldn’t - dilute it. Avoid cheap stuff. Make your own from good quality fruit (not rotting leftovers, as the industry tends to!).

4. Tea and herb tea: green and black tea appear to have good levels of antioxidants, although it has been reported that adding milk to black tea cancels them out! Green tea (and its younger sister white tea) are good choices, as are herb teas. Fruit teas sometimes have sweeteners, flavourings and the like, and you’ll need to read the list of ingredients before you buy.

5. Coffee: like tea, moderate consumption appears to be generally beneficial, and there is the well-documented improvement in endurance (for some people), and since caffeine is no longer a banned substance, using it before a race is probably a good thing. Studies also show that the usual diuretic effect of coffee seems to be annulled by hard effort.

So there you go. Water is still king, but drink according to your needs, diet, size, the weather; and enjoy tea, coffee and the odd glass of wine too. And if we find out more news on fluids you’ll probably find it at Runflux along with all the other news and links we post theire for your information and edification.

The times they are a-changing (although if you think about it they never a-stop a-changing, it’s just a way of a-saying a new idea is around).
Or, as the French existentialists would say, ‘plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose’ (the more things change, the more things stay the same). For a good couple of decades now, the orthodoxy has stated that endurance athletes need to consume foods such as bread, potatoes, rice and pasta in large quantities – the ‘traditional’ high-carbohydrate diet – in order to maintain their training load and stay healthy.

I say ‘for a good couple of decades’ since while people have run competitively for thousands of years, this high-glycaemic, high-carb existence was not always the way. The Victorian and Edwardian ‘pedestrians’ (in effect ultra-runners) breakfasted on mutton chops and beefsteak and beer, with a little stale bread – and lunch and dinner were often similar, with vegetables notable by their absence.

Ancient Greek and Native American distance runners certainly didn’t have pasta and sliced bread to fuel them, nor pastries, cakes and sweets full of white sugar, and relied on unprocessed foods to fuel their endurance.

So looking at a more Primal or Paleo style of eating, which involves restricting your diet to lean meats, fish and seafood, vegetables and fruit, and eating no grains or starch or dairy in any shape or form – that means no bread, no rice, no pasta, no breakfast cereals, no beans, no lentils, no milk, no cheese, no other processed foods like ready meals - and replacing the calories that you would consumed as these foods with vegetables and fruit (emphasis more on veggies than fruit) here are five reasons why keeping to a low-carb diet is good for you:

1. Veggies and fruits are a great source of trace nutrients – minerals, anti-oxidants and of course vitamins. Your immune system improves, and high-volume training is less likely to give you colds or throat infections, meaning you are less likely to have those frustrating breaks in training due to those irritating little illnesses
2. Grains and starches and dairy tend to increase blood acidity, which is a very undesirable state; eliminating them and eating more vegetables and fruit tends towards higher alkalinity, which prevents muscle loss over time
3. A diet high in branched-chain amino acids (BCAA), obtained from lean meat and fish, stimulates muscle repair and muscle growth
4. Storing glycogen – eating cereals and starches three times a day is massive overkill. A swift dose of starchy fruit, for example, like bananas, directly after exercise when the muscles will restock glycogen stores, is quite sufficient
5. Weight loss – who wants to lose those last ten pounds of fat clinging to their middles and flopping out over their waistbands? Dumping the starches will help this happen, as fewer calories are converted to fat when found to be surplus to requirements, and the ingestion of BCAAs promotes the acquisition of lean muscle mass.

Pop over to Runflux for your daily dose of running news and links.

10 best running foods

Here at runflux we like to make sure you eat well and stay healthy while you’re getting on with your running training and racing.

So we’ve made a list of the ten best foods to eat regularly to help you maintain your frequent run training load. They’re not really in any order, since it’s pretty much impossible to say that one single food is better than many others.

The criteria that we’ve looked at are those that best tie in with long-term health rather than short-term high output. After all, we assume that you want to run for most of your life and not just for the next couple of years. Our list therefore includes:
*foods that stimulate a reduced insulin response, in accordance with glycaemic index, or no insulin response at all

*quality protein

*omega 6:omega 3 ratios

*nutrient density versus calorific density
1. apples
2. venison
3. walnuts
4. bananas
5 . broccoli
6.  mackerel
7.  eggs
8.  prawns
9.  spinach
10.  strawberries

So as you wait for your walnut, venison, prawn and banana casserole to come out of the oven, go over to runflux to look at the news and links we have found for you.

Five tips to stop phantom hunger pangs making you get fat
We are born with natural appetite regulators. At some stage as we grow up there is a disconnect between those regulators and the ways in which many of us actually eat. When my 2-year-old daughter eats a smaller meal than usual, and I worry that she is not eating enough, I have to remind myself that she is probably right, and that I am transferring my own desires to be full and fears of being hungry onto her.

The reasons for this change from being in control of our eating to our eating being in control of us (not everyone, I appreciate, but many people) are various, and there isn’t room to discuss them here anyway. Basically, many people eat for reasons other than hunger; and they realise this, yet are unable to avoid munching away and stopping themselves losing those last few pounds of fat.

But here are a few tips to beat the munchies and to help you master those ‘non-hungry’ desires to eat. Before giving in to temptation…

- drink some water, especially if you are fancying something sweet – you might well be thirsty rather than having low blood suagr
- clean your teeth – it gives you something to do with your mouth
- hide the bad stuff, or, even better, don’t have any in the house – and have plenty of good stuff easily available for the tip below
- eat some nuts, or a carrot, or an apple and some celery, and promise to wait ten minutes to see if you still want that choc muffin (you probably won’t)
- procrastinate positively. What?! Procrastination is something we are all really good at, so simply apply it to a good cause! Just say you’ll have that biscuit, but not right now; you can eat it at some later time (then congratulate yourself for having resisted it).

We hope these tips help you gain control over your eating. Look for running news and links at Runflux - your daily dose of running.