Page 5 Module 7- Health
Fit or Fat
CovertBailey
I’m a biochemist, specifically a nutri-
tional biochemist, which means most of my
friends are rats. Unfortunately, most of them don’t
survive the friendship. When I was at MIT about
100 years ago, we had all these rats; you take a
million rats and you put a bunch of them in one
room and a bunch in another room and you feed
them weird diets and you try to find out why they
die. I was there a couple of years doing research and
after a while I just got to the point where I thought,
“This is ridiculous!” I have a very strong prejudice
and you might just as well know before I start, that
my prejudice is “exercise cures everything.” Now
I suppose that’s not true. But anyway, that’s my
prejudice.
I can remember being as young as 13-14 years
old and sitting at the dinner table and my mother
was enormously fat and my sister was fat. And I
remember my mother saying, “What’s wrong with
us? How come we eat lettuce and gain weight?”
And I’m there eating fifth helpings of everything,
apple pie and everything and never gain a pound. I
remember asking my father, “How come I never
gain weight?” He said he never gained weight. And
he said, “Baloney always weighs the same.” But my
mother would say, “What’s wrong with me? Why
do I gain weight so easily?” And I remember one
time saying, “Well Mom, it’s because you never
exercise.” My God! She smacked me right across
the face! And she said, “Who do you think gets up
first in this house? Who does this, who does etc.?”
And mothers are like that. They think because they
make your breakfast and they’re the last ones to go
to bed at night, they think that they exercise. Of
course, she doesn’t do any sport. What she does
basically is work. And most people confuse work
and how tired they are at the end of a day with real
exercise. Now if your muscles don’t get used,
except maybe 10 or 20 percent of their capacity,
then you can lose the other 80 or 90 percent of the
capacity of the muscle. The muscle dwindles and
gets replaced by fat.
When I was feeding all those dumb rats at MIT,
I finally got disgusted and I went to my professors
and said, “You know—all these rats are fat.
We should have some fit rats because
they’re different.” My prejudice is think-
ing that fit creatures were different from fat
creatures. So, I went to the professors and
I said, “We ought to get some fit rats and do all of
these experiments on them.” “Don’t be ridiculous,
a rat is a rat.” That was a real prejudice in those days
by my teachers. Anyway, I had a couple of other
students who felt the way I did—that sports made
the body different somehow. Very different. So
they went with me and we finally talked the teachers
into it and they said, “All right.” And they gave us
some grant money (your money!) and said, “OK, get
some fit rats and we’ll do something.” Well, where
the do you get a fit rat? I mean, what do you do—
look in the Yellow Pages under ‘fit’? The thing we
did is ordered rats, and we decided we’ll have a
room over here for the fit rats, and over here we’d
have ‘couch potato’ fat rats. We put these rats over
here in these cages and we’d say, “Would you please
jog 20 minutes every morning?” And, of course
they’d just look at you. We couldn’t figure out what
to do, we were scratching our heads, thinking, “God,
research is difficult!” We finally attached electric
wires to the bottom of their cages and we had those
round treadmills in there and we would ‘zap’ them
with electricity and they’d leap up and run. That’s
called motivation. We’d get them motivated and
they’d run. In due course, we had a room full of
mean marathon rats. We had another room full of
`couch potato’ rats. We started doing experiments
to see if they respond differently to different kinds
of diets. One of the first experiments I ever had done
was on sugar. Everyone tells you that sugar is bad
for us and we’re not supposed to eat sugar. And yet
an awful lot of athletes will eat sugar right in the
middle of a marathon. They’ll stop and have a sugar
drink in the middle of a marathon. You scratch your
head and think, “Is it really as bad as your dentist
says it is?” For this is for those of you who don’t have
a chemistry background. Sugar is a chain of carbon
atoms with hydrogen surrounding it. It’s called a
hydro-carbon. In the laboratory you can remove
one hydrogen (just one) and you can replace that
with a radioactive hydrogen atom. That’s called
`labeling’ in biology and research. That’s called a
labeled sugar molecule because now it has this
• • •
radioactive hydrogen atom on one corner.
So now you have a whole bowl full of sugar
with every single sugar molecule that has
what we call a radioactive tag on the mol-
ecule. Now you could mix that in the diet
of the rats that you’re feeding and after they eat it,
you could track where it goes because it’s radioac-
tive. You get a fancy Geiger counter and “blep,
blep, blep … there it is, there it goes.” You can track
the sugar molecule, “Where did you go, Bo?” We
mixed up radioactive sugar in the food of the fit rats
and the fat rats. We gave them the same diet but the
difference was extreme. It was one of the first
studies ever done. It’s over 20 years ago now.
Everybody should have heard about it by now, but
they probably haven’t. Because, sugar very easily
traced now in the fit rats, it would go to their muscles
in about 20 minutes; so if the rat ate a meal that had
radioactive sugar, you could find that radioactivity
in their muscles in 20 minutes. First they’d swallow
it and you could hear it down in here, then in the
intestines, and then it would go in their blood, and
(zoom) round the body and you could find it in their
bloodstream. So the blood sugar would go up like
it’s supposed to. But then, very quickly, within 15
or 20 minutes, blood sugar would start to come back
down again, which is a fairly normal thing. And
where was it going? It goes into muscle where it’s
supposed to. It goes in the muscle so it’s stored for
the next time they run. That’s normal. Then you go
to the ‘couch potato’ rats. And the couch potato’
rats, blood sugar would go into their stomachs, their
intestines, and then it goes in the blood. So far
everything’s the same. Blood sugar would go up
and instead of coming back down as quickly, it
would go up and it would go higher than in the fit
creatures, it would stay up much longer and it
wouldn’t come down for 45 minutes or an hour.
And when the blood sugar came down, instead of
going in the muscle, the sugar would go in their fat
cells. And, not only would it go into their fat cells
but it would be converted from a sugar into a fat.
Everyone knows that sugar is a carbohydrate. So
you actually have a conversion—a total whole
completely different molecular shape in a sugar
molecule as it passes from the blood stream into a
fat cell. The sugar as it goes into the fat cell, is
actually converted into a fat. So you have two
• • • •
TOTALLY different things that are hap-
pening. Not only does sugar go to a differ-
ent PLACE in fat creatures (compared to
fit creatures), but in addition to that, it goes
in and becomes a different molecule in fat
creatures than in fit creatures. All that really shows
is what my mom had said when I was 15 years old, when she’d say, “Boy, I eat bread and it really makes me fat.” And I’d say, “I don’t know why because I’d eat a whole loaf of bread and nothing would happen at all.” And my father would eat two loaves of bread—we used to compete. But my mom was right. Carbohydrates are fattening IF you’re al-
ready fat. But if you ain’t fat, bro, it ain’t bad to eat the carbohydrates. You dig? OK?
That was one of the first things I had ever done
and it was reported. I went to my professors and
said, “Can we do more experiments on fit versus fat
creatures?” Now the money started to roll! That’s
why you go to MIT—that’s where new things
happen, you know. Then, of course, the institutions
all over the world started doing that kind of thing—
where they get fit and fat rats, fit and fat dogs, and
finally, fit and fat graduate students, which is an
advanced form of rat. The studies now are just
unbelievable. There are studies even on things like
sleep, for example. You know the sleep people (I
don’t know what they call themselves—sleepologists
or whatever), put the electrodes on your head.
Those people divide sleep into five stages where
one is really, really shallow, and five is when you
are zonked out and the Russian Army walks through
your bedroom and you don’t even notice it. If you
sleep in stage one and two at night, you’re asleep but
if you wake up in the morning, you don’t feel
refreshed. Did you ever sleep one night and you
woke up in the morning and you just woke up—
mad? Did you ever just wake up mad? And you say,
“I don’t even know why I’m mad!” And you’re
wearing your watch and you think, “Gosh, I’ve been
here eight hours or nine!” Well, probably you’re
sleeping in one and two all night—back and forth.
And you don’t get refreshed. Whereas if you sleep
in four and five, you feel great. Five is called REM
sleep. Did you ever hear of that? It stands for Rapid
Eye Movement—where your eyes are moving back
and forth. That’s where you dream.
Here’s a good one. How long does it take
your dog to get into REM sleep? Have you
ever noticed that? Your dog’s out running
around the yard and you call him in and he’s
all excited. And you think, “God, if my son
was excited like that, he wouldn’t go to sleep for 17
days!” But in comes the dog and he makes 29 turns
on the rug and within minutes, he’s twitching! If
you went over to the dog and you lifted an eyelid
very carefully, you have to be careful not to awaken
him while they’re dreaming about the girl dog next
door. Right? That’s when you dream. Well, it’s
very restorative. Now the point is, dogs and wild
animals that are fit that run and run and run, they
drop through one, two, three sleep, down to four and
five. They get restored and when you wake them up
or they wake up, they’re ready to go. Where as we,
we go to bed at night and take a glass of beer or wine,
because it’s soporific, it tends to make us sleep. But,
there’s no drug that you can buy at the pharmacy or
beer or wine or any other that drops you into four
and five. As a traveling person who lectures a lot,
I get jet-lag, I’d arrive in Chicago, it’s two hours
difference and I’d think, “Well, I’ll have a glass of
wine so I get my sleep tonight.” Because you know
it does make you sleepy. Right? And you have that
feeling. But it doesn’t get you down. It only gets
you into one, two and three sleep. So you wake up
the next morning and think, “Well, it really didn’t
work.” Well, I’ve come to find out that the best
secret is that rather than try to take drugs, the best
secret is to get fit. Because as you get fitter and fitter
and fitter, you sleep more and more like your dog or
a deer.
And here’s another interesting thing. How long
would a deer stay alive if it was sound asleep in the
woods and danger approached and, of course, the
deer wakes up. What if the deer woke up like you
would in your bedroom? Say I come in your
bedroom at one o’clock in the morning – “Hey!
Want to go for a run?” You’d be looking for your
Luger, wouldn’t you? If you did get out of bed
without stumbling, you couldn’t find the door. The
point is that deer wouldn’t live very long like that.
A deer has to be not only instantly awake, but the
deer has to know which way to go. So, it’s an odd
thing, if you’re awakened from REM sleep, you’re
instantly oriented. If you’re awakened from two,
three and four sleep, you have to get oriented to
(
figure out where the dickens you are. Again
it’s a safety matter. Well, I just threw that
in for fun because I want people to get this
image in their mind, “Wow! Fit creatures
are different! And you can lay that on
people and they just go out the door and say, “Huh,
huh..” And they go on some stupid diet because all
they can think about is the superficial things in life,
about the fat on their body and what they look like.
For God’s sake, think about something deeper than
that! What are you going to be doing when you’re
60, when you’re 70, when you’re 80. Do you want
to be living life fully or do you just want to be some
dumb fat person. It’s so stupid! It’s the quality of
life that we’re talking about here. Come to find out
– exercise changes you and it changes you so profoundly that you can go on for days. I’ve been talking about this for over 19 years.
When I first started lecturing on fitness and what
it does to your body, I had three things that we knew
changed in your body but things that were proven—
absolutely proven, no question. And they were all
heart things—the heart enlarges, there are more
capillaries in the heart, blood pressure drops. I think
those were the three originally. Now, 19 years later,
I have a list of over 58 things that medical science
has proven and accepted. They don’t argue any-
more how it changes your sleep. For example,
here’s a whole room full of very, very busy aggres-
sive people, or you wouldn’t be here. People like
you find it’s awfully easy, isn’t it, to say, “Well, I
haven’t got time to exercise.” And you adjust your
tie. You say you don’t have time? You exercise and
you’ll sleep like your dog. And the result is that in
five hours of sleep at night, you’ll get more restored,
more jacked up and get more work done. So that
actually by taking a half hour out of your day to
exercise, you will generate an hour. Did I say that
right? Does that make sense? In other words, you
feel like you have time, but actually it gives you
time. So you sleep differently, blood pressure goes
down, all these medical things change that I think
are relatively boring. People get a little tired of it.
But still they’re important.
For the women in the room—think of bones. You
know how women have osteoporosis? And when
women come to menopause, they lose calcium like
crazy. Picture your grandmother, age 65 or 70.
She’s walking across the kitchen and breaks
her hip. How can you break a hip?! She
doesn’t even walk into something. Think
of how fragile that is! Well, that’s because
she’s lost all this calcium. Well, compare
that to that girl, Nadia Comaneci. Remember
Nadia? And here she is on the uneven parallel bars,
then she lets go and does what they call the dis-
mount. When she comes down, she comes down so
hard you can hear it throughout the whole olympic
gymnasium. Picture your grandmother doing that.
There would be a little pile of ashes. I mean, Nadia
has to have bones like rocks to be able to withstand
that sort of thing. So girls are supposed to be fragile.
That’s a lot of foolishness, isn’t it? We want people
to get fit. Fitness keeps women’s bones strong.
Fitness makes hard-driving businessmen sleep like
rocks. It makes people’s hearts better, lungs better,
everything.
You know how when you go to the hospital to get
something checked out, they have a million tests.
Doesn’t it seem like they have a million tests? They
want to test your blood. They do like nine tests on
your blood and then they test your lungs. They have
a million tests! Did you ever stop and think how
great it would be if the darn physicians could come
up with one test and get it over with. Something that
would just test everything. Wouldn’t that be neat?
Well, they have a test like that and they don’t even
bother to tell people about it. It called the oxygen
uptake test, and basically it’s a treadmill. You get
on a treadmill and breathe oxygen. And let me tell
you, the amount of oxygen that you use when you’re
running at your absolute maximum on a treadmill,
is directly proportional to your health. Because
oxygen goes in and doesn’t come back out when you
exhale, oxygen just goes—, gone, disappeared.
“Where did it go? Coming out of my elbows.”
Where it goes is into metabolism and it’s a direct
measure of how many calories you can burn when
you’re running full force. It’s a direct measure of
your heart pumping, your lungs oxygenating, the
amount of hemoglobin in your blood, the amount of
oxygen uptake in your muscles, and it’s like measur-
ing your car. One of the best ways to find out
whether your Porsche is in good shape is to take it
out on the freeway, isn’t it? Run the sucker! Why
take it into a garage and measure the fuel pump and
then you get it out on the freeway and it doesn’t run
because something else was wrong with it.
Do you see what I mean? Just take it out on
the freeway and find out what it will do!
It’s like the lady who has a nice Porsche and she only drives it about 18 miles a hour
around the city all the time. Pretty soon the plugs
are all fouled—it doesn’t run worth a darn. So she
takes it in to have it tuned up. And the man says,
“Well, how do you drive it, ma’am?” And she says,
“Oh, just around the city in traffic.” And he says,
“Leave it here and we’ll tune it up.” Got it? Right!
And when she leaves, they have it out on the
freeway at 180 miles per hour and when she comes
back, “That will be $300 please.” That sucker runs,
doesn’t it?
Try that with your own body. It’s what God gave
you. Quit wasting it. We’d like to see people get
fit because it changes so many things, so many
things. We found the Fountain of Youth. Remem-
ber Ponce de Leon walking around in the woods of
Florida somewhere and kept looking for the Foun-
tain of Youth? We already found it. Today it’s in
Chicago. Soon it will be in New Orleans. But
whatever, it really changes people. You all heard of
endorphines, that’s big in the newspapers now.
Endorphines—that means endo-morphine. Endo
means you make it yourself (endo means “inside”),
and morphine as you know, is what morphine is.
Well, endo-morphines means you’re on your own
drugs, bro. So you’re out there running down the
road, you’re making home-grown drugs. So you
get tense in your work and if you’ll jog or bicycle
or do some kind of exercise, you’ll sleep better
when you sleep, you’ll get more hours per day, and
in addition to that, you’ll also produce endo-mor-
phines or endorphines, which make you mellow
and take the stress out of your life. The list goes on
and on and on. And like I say, you can go to the
doctor and wait until you’re sick and have him test
one little thing, and another little thing, and another
little thing or you can just get out on the road this
afternoon and go for a run. And if you can go and
go and go and go and suck in lots of oxygen and
breathe well, you’re a fit guy. And the more you can
do that, the fitter you are. If you’re a woman, your
bones will get strong. If you’re a salesman, you
won’t have the stress and tension in your life.
You’ll sleep better. We found the Fountain of
Youth. Get out there and do it!