A recent, well-financed study shows the glycemic index (GI) to be a less-than-optimal way of managing diabetes with diet.  Meanwhile, a major name in the world of mainstream nutrition comments on this study and shows his own bias.  Oh dear.  Let’s take a look.

Before we launch into this study, which we’re going to just briefly review because I want to spend more time on the commentary, I want to propose to you a thought experiment.  Suppose I ask you to design a study to see what happens when subjects with diabetes eat low-GI carbs as compared to what happens when they eat high-GI carbs.  It seems pretty simple.  If you’ve got half a brain, you would recruit subjects with diabetes, go through all of the randomizing rigmarole to ensure that both groups of subjects were as alike as possible, i.e., subjects in both groups were about the same size, same ratio of sexes, same degree of blood sugar elevation, etc.  Then you would start the subjects in one group on an amount of carbohydrate, let’s say 220 gm per day, that were mainly low-GI carbs and the other group on about the same amount of carbohydrate composed of high-GI carbs.  You would teach each of these groups how to follow their specific GI diets and would have a way of monitoring for compliance.  Then you would set them to it and recheck them in 3 months or 6 months or a year or whatever you decided your study length to be.  Pretty simple stuff, right?

Just for grins, let’s throw in a twist.

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`I quite agree with you,’ said the Duchess; `and the moral of that is–Be what you would seem to be–or if you’d like it put more simply–Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.’

`I think I should understand that better,’ Alice said very politely, `if I had it written down: but I can’t quite follow it as you say it.’

Lewis Carroll

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You think carbohydrates aren’t addictive?  You think it’s easy to give them up?  You don’t think it possible that people might prefer carbs to life?

Think again.

A story appeared in the online version of Time Magazine last year that I read when it came out, put aside to blog about later, then got sidetracked.  A reader sent me a link to it a few days ago, which brought it back to the front of my mind.

The article discusses a study being done in Germany using a carb-restricted diet to fight cancer.  In pre-WWII days, a German scientist, Otto Warburg, received a Nobel Prize for his work in sussing out the fact that cancer cells don’t generate energy the same way that normal cells do.  Cancer cells get their energy, not like normal cells, from the mitochondrial oxidation of fat, but from glycolysis, the breakdown of glucose withing the cytoplasm (the liquid part of the cell).  This different metabolism of cancer cells that sets them apart from normal cells is called the Warburg effect.  Warburg thought until his dying day that this difference is what causes cancer, and although it is true that people with elevated levels of insulin and glucose do develop more cancers, most scientists in the field don’t believe that the Warburg effect is the driving force behind the development of cancer.

But it stands to reason that it can be used to treat cancer that is already growing.  Since cancers can’t really get nourishment from anything but glucose, it stands to reason that cutting off this supply would, at the very least, slow down tumor growth, especially in aggressive, fast-growing cancers requiring a lot of glucose to fuel their rapid growth.

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Late last night I was transferring some medical papers from my old moribund PC onto my Mac when I came across an article that infuriated me when it came out.   Now it simply made me laugh, although I have to admit to at least a tinge of annoyance still.

As I’ve mentioned before, MD and I often feel like the Rodney Dangerfields of the low-carb diet biz or, worse yet, the Victor Flemings (don’t know who Victor Fleming is?   Look him up and see what he did in 1939.   And you don’t know who he is, right?).   At any rate it seems that whenever low-carb diets are mentioned in a positive way, which, fortunately, that are more and more often these day, we and/or Protein Power never make the list.   It’s always Atkins, South Beach and the Zone.   And of those three, only one is a true low-carb diet.   The other is a quasi, pansy low-carb diet, whose author goes around denying that his diet is a low-carb diet.   The other isn’t a low-carb diet, since a diet in which 40 percent of the calories are made up of carbohydrate hardly qualifies for the modifier ‘low.’   But when it comes to attacking low-carb diets, somehow we always seem to make that list.

Now that I’ve gotten that out of my system (sorry for the whine), I can move on to the paper that attacks low-carb diets and in which we prominently figure. This article, published in the May 2000 issue of the Journal of the American College of Nutrition (free full text here), takes an ‘unbiased’ look at several different diets that were on the market at that time.  The title says it all. Read more »