Killer in the Kitchen? Download PDF

Meat causes cancer, at least according to a shocking report from the World Health Organization. But there’s one big problem with that—our muscles argue otherwise. 

The founding father of modern dietary science was a German chemist named Carl von Voit who loved to dispense advice on how to build big muscles. His favorite maxim: “Flesh makes flesh.” In the mid-1800s, physician von Voit made discoveries that led to what every bodybuilder now knows: Consume animal protein, or “flesh,” and your muscles grow. To the recent World Health Organization (WHO) report villainizing red meat, von Voit would have declared bullshit. (That’s quatsch in German.) And his outrage would’ve been justified.  Continue reading →

Harness the Power of Your Muscle Matrix Download PDF

Want huge biceps, six-pack abs, and perfect pecs? Then it’s time to rethink everything you think you know about muscle building. Because new evidence suggests that it’s not actually your muscles but your connective tissue—the muscle “matrix” that holds your muscles together—that triggers strength and size. The good news? You can exercise it, too.

Picture a medieval torture rack for Smurfs. The device, called a uniaxial tensile tester, is about the size of a shoebox. With long tweezers, a doctoral researcher at the UC Davis Functional Molecular Biology Lab plucks a freshly grown, two-week- old anterior cruciate ligament, or ACL, from an incubator and clamps the ends to anchors on the tensile tester. A USB cable then hooks it to a laptop, allowing the researcher to tweak how hard and fast the tendon gets yanked, and for how long— hours, sometimes days. Continue reading →