Well, smart people do worry about those long term. Because it means the connective tissue in the muscles is the weak link in his chain of ill health. The Quakes are as behind the times as people on this board and won't be doing anything to fix it.
I suppose. It probably isn't where to start. If he likes liver, grass fed beef or lamb liver will do. If he does not, most people adjust their palate easiest with heart. IMO, the Quakes would do best to hire a paleo chef (or meal delivery service) to get them the whole team started in a way where the food will taste great and they can ease into to some aspects they may not have been raised with. Then for Djalo specifically, he should have a bone broth or a soup made from one each and every day because of his specific problem.
It said a "solid foundation" with organ meat and bone broth ... which I think is way, WAY, WWWWAAAAYYYY over the top.
If you only shop at Farmer's Markets or grow/raise your own food, I'd agree. If you are trying to do it shopping at Safeway, etc. It's a bit harder. Our intestinal track evolved over a time period void of modern agriculture and most of that time we had access to fire. It is easy to confuse our current average expected life span with proper diet instead of advances in medicine.
Anyone can easily maintain a healthy diet by sourcing conventional (non-organic, non-free range) foods from the supermarket. Of course farm fresh etc. is better but not so much that it's worth the extra cost and effort for most people. Our intestinal tract is highly adaptive. In less that 10,000 years many human populations have developed the permanent ability to digest lactose. Other human populations are able to subsist on a predominantly meat diet, or one featuring mainly carbohydrates. There is no such thing as a single "proper diet". The human body is able to thrive on various combinations of food. The traditional Inuit were able to obtain sufficient vitamin C from meat. When the environment doesn't provide proper nutrition, our bodies evolve to make do. I wouldn't be surprised if in a few generations our bodies will evolve to handle the huge sugar loads in modern processed foods. In the meantime, the best chance to reach the "current average expected life span" is to avoid consuming too much sugar (and processed fats/carbs).
It said a "solid foundation" with organ meat and bone broth ... which I think is way, WAY, WWWWAAAAYYYY over the top.[/QUOTE] He's clearly unhealthy given the repeated nature of the same sort of problem. It would be a matter of whether you want to try to heal him relatively quickly or for it to take longer than we have. They're not going to do it anyway. But if you want to fix connective tissue, you need to provide the correct building blocks. I don't know that it would be a super easy adjustment, but it would be the most likely to succeed in the shortest time if he actually gives a shit about playing rather than being always out with so-called injuries. It's about using food as medicine and not an issue of getting by. As evidenced by all the diseases of modern civilization and the western diet? The decling lifespan of human? The declining brain size and IQ of humans? The epidemics of obesity and diabetes? We're not exactly thriving presently. Professional athletes can't make it through a season without damage that prevents them doing their jobs...IMO, it's a problem. And the other aspect is, players aren't even maximizing their potential performance-wise. They could eat their way to being better players, above and beyond merely staying healthy to play. This is the easiest type of mutation to establish. It's a function that exists for all babies. So, it's merely preventing the switch from turning the activity of the enzyme off. So the gene for lactose tolerance already exists. And this evolution in only some populations with very high selective pressure. You can't evolve a new function in this time-frame. So, lactose tolerance is the best-case scenerio for time-frames. There's zero scientific basis for this. I think it's more likely in a couple of generations, the % of people world-wide that are obese or overweight will top 50%, probably higher given we're at 66% in the US now. You can flip some epigentic switches in a couple of generations, but evoluteion takes a lot longer. The epigentic switches we've been flipping to survive seem to have resulted in great things like narrow jaws, crowded teeth, orthodontia and sleep apnea....and then there's autism & ADHD....and narrow pelvises and difficult birth....and falling brain size. You yourself gave the best case scenario being 10,000 years for evolution...you know how many generations that is? But in terms of the Earthquakes, what they do now is failing. Players are far too easily breaking down from non-traumatic injuries. If our ancestors broke down this easily from similar levels of activity, I don't think humans would even exist. These breakdowns are not natural, they're not a sign of good health. The Quakes invest a lot of money in these guys. They piss away a lot of that money with guys sitting out. They don't even to seem to care about all this wasted money. I can understand people's fear that they don't want to admit to the dietary contribution to disease because then how do they justify not considering diet as a part of healthy aging, ie a long healthspan as opposed to merely a long lifespan? But professional athletes have a job that they're paid hansomly for that requires not just talent and skill but durabilty. I think they should do what it takes to be as healthy as possible to stay on the field, even if it mean eating differently than they grew up eating. It boggles the mind that they don't care maximizing their chances of being injury free and maximizing performance... and that their employers don't require it as a pre-requisite of the job.
I knew we should have signed that Mesopotamian Neanderthal winger. Dude can run all day, and never gets injured. And big head (though not quite as big as Taylor Twellmen's) - powerful headers. :--)
On YD, I would consult my medical staff and get the best professional advice I could get, to see if they believe that he can be put on some kind of training / diet plan to make things better. I don't care what it is, eating bone soup, standing on his head 5x a day, surfing with Lennie, running tethered on the beach with MPG (see photo below), whatever it is, I find it hard to believe that something can't be done to improve the situation over the medium term.
I don't think we can just assume it's a diet problem. He may have a lingering injury that is messing up his biomechanics, or he might have poor biomechanics naturally, or unbalanced muscle strength, or improper hydration, or a combination of issues. As for "fixing" connective tissue with diet, there is an optimal nutrient profile for glucosamynoglican production -- a massive dose of B vitamins, collagen, chondroitin sulfate, glucosamine, etc. isn't going to speed that up. I do agree many athletes, and people in general, have a poor diet. The way to fix that is not to devise some unrealistic hard to follow food regiment but rather with a balanced and practical approach. Maybe that wasn't the best example but I wasn't necessarily talking about a new "function". It isn't a new function that allows Tibetans to survive at elevations that would be deadly for many lowlanders. Assuming these examples are all epigenetic (which isn't necessarily the case), it just goes to show that significant biological variety can occur without major genetic changes. And it's not that lactose tolerance into adulthood required 10,000 years to develop ... it's that the adaptation has occurred in many populations on repeated occasions during those 10,000 years. As for "fructose tolerance", I was half-joking about that. First, I haven't seen any evidence that the Quakes spend more or less effort on their players' diet compared to other MLS teams. Second, you are always going to have some people doing whatever the hell they want especially when it comes to something personal like eating. What is the coach going to do? Sit a player if he drank a Coke during the week?
Boy -- with all this conjecture, should I believe that Bill Frist was right in diagnosing Terri Schiavo via video? Silly argument -- since I assume nobody here has had the opportunity to examine Yannick or monitor his diet...
I don't think anyone knows what Djalo's diet is, or his training regimen. I think the question is, no matter what it is, can it be changed or improved in some way to make it less likely that he gets these muscle sprains? FWIW there is guy posting to Robert Jonas's twitter account, another guy who I think writes for mlssoccer, the shinguardian guy, who is coming on pretty strong with the idea that Djalo's injury issues were a known when the Quakes loaned him. That may be the case - that probably would make the loan a lot cheaper. But I think that's his point - you get cheap players on loan because they have injury issues, well, you get what you pay for. In any case, that's water under the bridge. What interests me the most at this point is, can he be at least partially "fixed" somehow, i.e. worked into a condition where he gets injured less often.