The subtitle of this post could just as easily have been: Feed your mitochondria right.

The two videos below pretty much tell the whole sad tale of doctors and nutrition.  Taken together, they confirm the widespread notion that doctors, in general, know very little about nutrition and seem to be proud to keep it that way.

This first video has made the rounds on the internet.  I’ve had it sent to me or recommended to me a dozen times, but I had never watched it until just a few days ago.  I was put off because of its length, which, at a little over 17 minutes, seems like an eternity in internet viewing time.  But I hope anyone reading this post doesn’t make the mistake I did and avoid watching because of the length.  It is a spectacular talk given by Dr. Terry Wahls, a female physician who was struck down by a relentlessly progressive neurodegenerative disorder.  She describes how she was able to restore her health by revamping her diet in in a way designed to properly feed her mitochondria.*  The transformation is almost unbelievable, especially considering the disease she was battling.  If you haven’t already seen this video – watch it.  I guarantee you’ll be glad you did.  And while you watch, pay careful attention to what her diet doesn’t contain much of.

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The first week of January is the traditional time for overweight people to start a diet.  For years I’ve told my patients (and anyone else who would listen) to fight the holiday eat-a-thon and start the new year at the same weight they started the month of November.  During the time between Thanksgiving and the end of the year, so the media typically reports, the average weight gain is anywhere from five to ten pounds per person.  A study in Nutrition Reviews showed the weight gain to be much less on average but a little over five pounds in those who are already obese.  This same study confirms a belief I’ve had for many years.

The best and easiest way to stay slim is to never become obese in the first place.

What I mean by making this seemingly obvious statement is that when a person goes from being normal weight to being overweight it is an indication that something metabolically has gotten broken.  At this point, no one knows for sure what gets broken, but many (and I count myself in this ever growing group) believe the damage occurs in the mitochondria, the organelles within the cells that are the energy furnaces.  Once whatever it is that gets broken breaks, it is difficult from that point on to lose weight and maintain weight loss without effort.

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Over a half decade ago Professor Jared Diamond, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Guns, Germs, and Steel, famously wrote

“The adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered.”

Dr Diamond was referring, of course, to the devolution of human health that took place as mankind suffered the corporal transformation driven by the mismatch between hunter-gatherer genes and an agricultural diet and lifestyle. Smaller stature, decreased cortical bone thickness, obesity, increased incidence of infectious diseases, dental caries, periodontal disease, vitamin deficiencies, and even famine – all common in agriculturists – were not, for the most part, the lot of pre-agricultural man.

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A little over two years ago I wrote a post on Pentabosol, a weight-loss supplement we and our research partner developed and made available for a number of years.  In that post I mentioned that MD and I were contemplating actively marketing Pentabosol again.  We reformulated the product and changed its name to Metabosol, but our timing was all wrong because at about the same time, we wound up launching our SousVide Supreme project as well.  Never having been in the appliance business, we had not even the most minimal idea as to how much time that venture was going to take.  As a consequence, the weight-loss product project took a back seat and more or less fell between the cracks.  Now that things on the sous vide front requiring our direct attention have slowed down a bit (for us, not for the company) we decided to turn our attention to the nutritional supplement and made an annoying (to us) discovery that may benefit you. (More about which later.) In case you don’t go back and read the old post, let me quickly review the Pentabosol (Metabosol) story.

Pentabosol

NOTE: DUE TO OVERWHELMING DEMAND, WE HAVE JUST RUN OUT OF ALL OF OUR SUPPLIES OF METABOSOL.  THANKS FOR YOUR INTEREST.

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Of all the dangerous ideas that health officials could have embraced while trying to understand why we get fat, they would have been hard-pressed to find one ultimately more damaging than calories-in/calories-out. That it reinforces what appears to be so obvious—obesity as the penalty for gluttony and sloth—is what makes it so alluring. But it’s misleading and misconceived on so many levels that it’s hard to imagine how it survived unscathed and virtually unchallenged for the last fifty years.

It has done incalculable harm. Not only is this thinking at least partly responsible for the ever-growing numbers of obese and overweight in the world—while directing attention away from the real reasons we get fat—but it has served to reinforce the perception that those who are fat have no one to blame but themselves. That eating less invariably fails as a cure for obesity is rarely perceived as the single most important reason to make us question our assumptions, as Hilde Bruch suggested half a century ago. Rather, it is taken as still more evidence that the overweight and obese are incapable of following a diet and eating in moderation. And it puts the blame for their physical condition squarely on their behavior, which couldn’t be further from the truth.

Gary Taubes from Why We Get Fat

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