Health & Nutrition by Michael R. Eades, M.D.

As I was going through all the comments that had stacked up while I was away, I came across one about the Ornish program that I thought might be of interest to the group. Here is the gist of it:

after my 3rd heart attack dec 04 I quit the veggie/ornish just plant food eating and now with type 2 this yr am still doing great with no carbs. also off BP drugs and since May have stopped all lipitor and crestor (7 days of crestor was enough) still getting stronger and no more brain fog feeling, wish I knew then what I know now

This comment reminded me of one I read in the long list of comments after Ornish’s response to John Tierney’s blog post about Taubes’ comments on the Israeli low-carb study. Said a commenter who states that he works in a clinic that uses the Ornish regimen:

I too, happen to work in a clinic that espouses the Ornish program. In practice, however, as long as patients do the stress relief, engage in exercise, and quit smoking, they seem to do fine. The diet doesn’t seem to do very much one way or the other, especially since most people give it up quickly. They seem to dislike it.
The diet does wreak havoc with our diabetic patients, however. They are put on the diet because diabetics are prone to heart disease, but the huge quantities of starch required by the Ornish program (whole grain or not) makes make blood sugar control almost impossible. There’s a lot of internal argument about this now.

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Earlier this year I posted about the ACCORD study that was discontinued because more subjects in the intensive-glucose-control arm of the study were dying than were those whose glucose was less strictly controlled. In this post I made the case that one of the reasons this might be happening is that the strict-glucose-control was brought about by various drug regimens, none of which address the underlying problem of too much insulin. If insulin resistance and hyperinsulinemia are the real problems here (and my bet is that they are), drug combinations deal only with one of the symptoms - the elevated glucose of type II diabetes - and not the underlying problem. The underlying problems continue to chug along causing more disease, disability and death. (Another possibility is that the drugs themselves are causing the increase in death.) All of which doesn’t really make the outcome all that surprising.

And even less surprising is the horde of diabetes ‘experts’ who are stampeding over the cliff with the idea that careful glucose control isn’t the panacea they had hoped it would be. Unfortunately, it isn’t they who will be splattered on the rocks below; it will be their patients instead.

Last week’s New England Journal of Medicine published the ACCORD study (full text here), and the authors concluded: Read more »

I got an email today about the upcoming 2010 USDA Nutritional Guidelines and Food Pyramid from Richard Feinman, Ph.D., who asked me to pass it along to the readers of this blog. The US Department of Agriculture updates the nutritional guidelines every five years - the last time was in 2005. You can find the link below to get the executive summary of the 2005 guidelines. In a few days the scientific group that works on these guidelines will be selected. Please write and voice your opinion that scientists who are experts in the low-carb arena should be members of this panel.

A few years ago I was on the O’Reilly Factor on Fox News (I don’t know how to get the tape of the show. If anyone knows how, please give me a heads up, and I’ll get it and post it) discussing the Nutritional Guidelines and the Food Pyramid. I said my piece, and Bill O’Reilly said something along the lines of: Ah, Doctor, who cares what the guidelines say? Nobody pays any attention to them anyway.

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A few days ago the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), the organization coordinating the ACCORD study (Action to Control Cardiovascular Risk in Diabetes), pulled the plug on the glucose lowering part of it. Why? Because in a stunning mid-trial finding, subjects in the arm of the study who were edging their glucose levels closer to normal were dying in significantly greater numbers than those whose glucose levels remained elevated.

What the heck is going on? Conventional wisdom has it that the lower (toward the normal range) the blood sugar the better. It has been the goal of diabetic management to reduce blood sugar levels as close as possible to the normal range; now comes this disastrous study presenting dramatic evidence to the contrary. Amazingly, those subjects who died in the lowered-blood-sugar group succumbed to some form of cardiovascular disease, the very condition the more aggressive blood-sugar lowering was crafted to prevent. Do these tragic deaths invalidate the sugar hypothesis of heart disease?

I don’t think so, but before we get into why, let’s summarize this experiment.

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