Philly just got hit with what was supposed to be the winter storm of the century, but honestly I have to tell you I was pretty underwhelmed. It snowed six inches and it was cold. Maybe it’s the growing-up-Minnesotan, or maybe we ​just dodged the worst of it, but I don’t see the big deal.

Anyway, it got me thinking about something I always do when I’m shoveling snow, which is to do my neighbor’s walks as well. In fact, with some of the lighter snows we’ve gotten I do the entire block on my side. It really doesn’t take that much longer, and I’m already all bundled up out there doing it, a few minutes more isn’t going to make much of a difference to me. Plus, it’s even easier in the city. When I lived in suburbia and I had a big ass tank of a snowblower I would drive it over to the neighbor’s and do their driveway as well.

The thing is, especially in a city, even if just one person on a block goes out of their way to do a few extra houses it has a non-linear effect on how easy it is to get around a snowed-in city. Most people don’t even bother to shovel their sideways to begin with, much less do more than their share of sidewalk.

When you go out of your way to do a little extra while you’re already there​, it changes everything for everyone.

Not everyone lives in a snowy climate, and it may only snow meaningfully a few times a year, but maybe you see where I’m going with this.

– Pick up an extra dog poop when you pick up your dogs’.
– Put away some weights that are strewn about the gym, that you didn’t take out.
– Make a double batch of chili or bread and give it to someone you know needs it (someone you know is invariably very ill, grieving, or going through a hard time – food always helps.)

And so on.

I don’t mean to be too preachy, and this might sound like an obvious thing, but are you actually taking the extra time to do it? Listen I’m no saint by any means, but this is something I make an active attempt to do as often as possible that makes my community better.

​I started baking bread over the holidays. Growing up I don’t even know that I was aware you could buy bread, because we never had anything in our house other than fresh bread my mom baked every couple weeks. In the winter, she’d tweak her recipe a little bit and make julekake​ which is a Norwegian bread that is slightly sweeter and has candied fruit in it, which is weird because we have zero point zero Norwegian heritage in our family, but I digress.

I had watched Michael Pollan’s incredible Cooked series for the third or fourth time, and I decided I was finally going to undertake sourdough bread baking. That entire series is fantastic by the way, if you haven’t seen it. My good friend the gentleman butcher and guest writer of the recent hunting article, Aron, is a co-owner of the butcher shop featured in the Fire episode. Anyway, I digress again.

So for the past week it’s been sourdough starters and flour explosions in the kitchen almost every day. And I’ll tell you what it’s damn good bread already, even if there is room for improvement. Easily better than anything you could buy at the store.

If it seems weird that a fitness guy would be so hype on bread, I’d like you to consider the following:

One of my overarching nutrition principles for figuring out what is best for you is to look at your genetic heritage AND your environmental circumstances for the previous generation or two. Lots of bread in both those for me.

Next, I think it’s important to look at what historically has been an important staple. Aside from eastern and southeastern parts of Asia, it’s pretty difficult to find a place or time in human history where bread hasn’t been an absolutely critical component of sustenance. It’s literally called the staff of life because it’s so important.

You can tell me that we’re all gluten intolerant now and we have wheat brain, but I’ll tell you that for some five thousand plus years humans have been thriving on bread so the logical conclusion is not that bread is bad but as they say YOUR bread is bad.

Modern commercial bread is a monoculture that suffers from the same deficiencies that monoculture organics like plants suffer from.

Did you know that the banana, as we know it, is probably going extinct? Because we thought it would be a good idea to reduce and control the variability in the organism down to what is now an unsurvivable species. But I digress, again.

The first iterations of modern bread were so devoid of nutrition that they actually made people sick on an epidemiological scale. Hence the advent of fortified and enriched bread – with nutrients added back in. Keep in mind this was supposed to be an “improvement” over technology that provided sustenance for over five thousand years, and it required spackle to fix the problem that the improvement created.

Bread can be a major source of calcium, but most modern bread is completely devoid of it. Chances are you’re not getting enough calcium as it.

So, bread produced in the old way using wild yeast and however much time is necessary for the process to complete without adulteration passes my second test.

Ultimately having passed two of the other principle tests the most important test is how does this actually work for me? I can’t point to any noteworthy ill effects when I eat bread, so it definitely passes.

Beyond the nutrition side of things, this is another way to develop a useful skill that further improves my family’s autonomy – which is never, ever a bad thing. People think making bread is hard and complicated, and it’s really not, just follow the steps. But that’s another topic for another day.

So that’s what I’ve been up to. If you’re interested in pursuing sourdough bread, I found this post very helpful as a starting point.

This one is for the men in the audience. While I will admit that I made the subject slightly attention-getting on purposes by framing it in terms of gender, the reason why will make sense in a moment.

At some point some crafty health researchers asked the question, why is it that pre-menopausal women have lower mortality rates from heart disease as compared to men of the same age? Further to that, why is it that in post-menopausal women the rates start to get closer to men’s and further to that, why is it that in cases of hysterectomy (relevant part here is no more menstruation) the rates in those women rise towards those of similar-age men?

Which is to say, does losing blood through menstruation have something to do with rate of heart disease?

Why jump to this theory when there are certainly myriad other differences between men and women, pre and post-menopause?

Well, you see, while iron is absolutely a crucial element for good health and proper metabolic function, as with any element the hormetic zone is a curve – too little is bad, and too much is bad.

Now to speak in absolute generalities that are not at all useful on an individual level but can be useful to see which bucket you might fit in generally women tend to have more issues with not getting or keeping enough iron, and men generally tend to have the opposite issue. Anemia is bad, but so his hemochromatosis. I am not a doctor, this isn’t medical advice, and you should get your blood levels checked.

Without getting into a graduate level systems biology lecture the likes of which I’m unqualified to give and you don’t want to listen to so suffice to say having too much iron in the blood is Real Bad™. Getting enough iron from dietary sources is pretty easy: use a cast iron pan for some of your cooking, eat some red meat (especially offal), some beans, dark leafy greens and you’re probably good. Getting rid of iron is a real problem for men, given that the body has no mechanism for doing so – except blood loss.

(One thing to note, they will check your ferritin level the day you give blood, so you’re basically getting a free iron check and it should prevent you from donating if you’re low.)

Which is where giving blood comes in. Hopefully I don’t have to convince you of the benefits to others of giving blood. If someone ends up in a hospital and needs blood, they will die if they can’t get a transfusion. There’s no substitute, no synthetic alternative, and you can’t pump someone full of Hawaiian Punch. Blood transfusions are definitely one medical procedure that indisputably saves lives.

But what most people don’t consider is the benefit to themselves. So check this out:

In a Finnish study following almost 3000 men for a decade literally one man in the group had a heart attack – he was a blood donor. The rest of the cohort? 316 non-donors had heart attacks. In a statistical model probably no one understands blood donors had an 88% reduction in risk of acute heart attack compared to non-donors.

In another well powered study of people with peripheral arterial disease the group that participated in iron reduction (basically, they gave blood) saw significant differences in new cancer, and an overall 37% reduction in cancer incidence.

But, David, don’t you usually heavily criticize and virtually dismiss this type of long-view epidemiological science?

Yes, I do when there’s an attempt to ascribe a level of risk to a single factor. Like let’s say the studies that purport to draw a connection between cured meats and cancer. When you’re trying to tease out a single factor for a risk in the negative are basically saying “Give up this thing for this potential benefit.”

What you have here is essentially the opposite though. What most of the studies show is that there seems to be significant benefit to donating blood, and there are some potential mechanisms for why that might be. So there’s no discernible downside, and a lot of potential upside. In finance terms this is an option you take every single time.

It may very well be that actually removing a pint of blood isn’t the factor that renders the benefits, but we can’t ignore that they’re highly associated and you can reap those rewards just by giving blood.

For example, it’s entirely possible that the benefits of blood donation have nothing to do with iron and instead are related to the ramping up of erythropoietin production.

One more thing. Phlebotomy is a practice that spans cultures and several thousand years. Lots of dumb things that have no benefit or are harmful could be described in the same way, but I always pay a little more attention when something shows up almost universally and has stood the test of time. If nothing else those give us good starting points of things to examine more rigorously and removing a pint of blood once a quarter or so seems to pass that examination – so far anyway.

So make that appointment today gents.