A toxic environment
In the last post I wrote that I would explain why George Bray and his brethren in the academic obesity research world are in great measure responsible for the toxic world they all blame for the obesity epidemic. We live in a world, they say, filled with impossible to resist foods that throw us into hedonic overdrive. As long as we live in such a world, there is no hope – other than drugs, of course – for the obesity epidemic to be reversed. They may be correct. But, as I said, they are in part responsible. Let’s see why.
You can’t just go around gibbering as they do about a toxic environment without defining what it is that is toxic about it. If pressed, these folks almost always default to the position that it is the elevated levels of fat in the diet that are toxic. They will often say – as Bray did in his rebuttal to Taubes – that the ready availability of high-fat, high-sugar foods is what makes the environment toxic, but that is just a kind of code for high fat, which is what they really believe causes obesity.
The statistics show a different story however. Most food consumption data indicates that fat consumption has actually been falling or, at worst, has remained about the same. Caloric intake has been on the rise, however.
The latest NHANES data show that the average American consumes about 250 calories more per day. If fat is falling or remaining the same, and calories are increasing, those calories can come from only two sources: protein or carbohydrate. Since protein intake pretty much mirrors fat intake, it’s most likely that the increase in calories has come from an increase in carbohydrate intake. Which is what the data actually show. NHANES data confirm that this 250 calorie increase comes from carbohydrates.
So, if anything has changed in the diet over the past 40 years, it is that carbohydrate intake has increased, which is a pretty good argument to say that if the food environment has become toxic, it is the increased carbohydrate intake that has made it so.
If you look at the scientific literature and try to find a study that shows that consuming more fat causes health problems, you’re going to come away empty handed. Sure, there are a lot of studies out there showing that bad things happen when fat intake goes up, but subjects in those studies are eating a ton of carbs along with the fat. I religiously read the medical literature, and I haven’t found any studies showing a decline in health with an increase in fat without an increase in carbs or calories going along with it.
It ain’t the same with carbohydrates. The scientific literature is crawling with papers showing detrimental effects from overconsumption of carbohydrates.
It’s pretty obvious to anyone who cares to look that if there is indeed a toxic environment out there luring us all to overeat and become obese, that toxic environment is made of carbohydrate.
If this is true – and I think it is – then why are Dr. Bray and his henchmen responsible?
Easy. They encourage carb consumption by focusing the public’s attention on fat and away from carbohydrates. Bray and friends are the go-to experts driving the recommendations of various governmental agencies that ultimately drive large food manufacturers to produce products adding to the toxicity of the environment.
General Mills, Nestle, General Foods, Kellogg, and other giant food companies aren’t managed by intrinsically evil people who set out to make us all fat. These companies – just like Microsoft, IBM, Exxon and others – are in business to make an honest buck for their shareholders. Shareholders want to see growth in value and a steady income for their investments, and management wants to deliver. But these companies are constrained by what they sell.
Basically they sell calories. If you take the number of people in the United States (we’re just talking domestic production here) and multiply that number by the average caloric intake per person, you can arrive at the total number of calories consumed by the population. That’s the market for these companies.
If you are running a food company selling calories, you can grow your company in just a few ways. You can do nothing and just grow as the population grows, but all food companies can do that so you don’t achieve any advantage over the competition. You can improve your branding and merchandising and/or develop new products to try to gain a bigger market share of the calories consumed. You can buy one of your competitors.
And you can work to simply increase the average number of calories consumed by each person and therefore make the overall caloric intake of the country rise. How do you make people eat more? Simple. You make products that are convenient, tasty, inexpensive and widely available. And you make them addictive. What makes them addictive? Carbohydrates, of course. What gets the blame? Fat, of course.
These processed foods are typically a mixture of fat and sugar, which provides a taste sensation that most people seem not to be able to resist. They want more and more of it. And food companies are happy to provide it. The USDA’s School Nutrition Dietary Assessment from 2007 showed that the three products groups consumed the most in schools were candy; cookies, cakes and brownies; and soft drinks. All fat and sugar and, in the case of soft drinks, sugar alone.
All of these foods are thought of as sweets. People who crave them are often said to have a sweet tooth. Yet most academic obesity experts criticize these products because they are high in fat. In their minds, it’s the fat that’s the problem, not the sugar.
Since these academicians fill the seats of all the government panels that convene to come up with solutions to the obesity problem, the usual message is to cut the fat. So the food companies cut the fat or change the type of fat…and leave the sugar. The addictive part of the equation doesn’t change.
Lest you think this is a problem only for children in schools, I would encourage you to go to just about any office in America and take a look in the break room. You’ll find cakes and cookies and brownies and chips and all the rest of the stuff you find in schools. The problem is endemic.
And it is going to be extremely difficult to change.
I just finished one of the better books I’ve read in a long time. It’s a book that opened my eyes as to why it will be difficult to change and why Bray et al are going to make it even more difficult.
The book, titled Stuffed: An Insider’s Look at Who’s (Really) Making America Fat, was written by Hank Cardello, a former executive in the food industry who spent his career at General Mills, Coca Cola and other food giants. Mr. Cardello got sick and, after experiencing an epiphany about his own diet and health, realized 
that the companies he had worked for (along with many others) were in great measure responsible for his illness.
If you are interested in finding out how the food industry drives us to overeat, you need to read this book. I can’t recommend it highly enough.
I had no idea how the various arms of the food industry – food manufacturers, grocery stores and restaurants – all work hand in hand to make us fat. The government is in there, too, always making the wrong moves and usually making the situation worse. I was always naïve enough to think that if only McDonalds or one of the other fast food giants would make some minor changes, the world would be a better place. But after reading this book, I can see why those changes are almost impossible to effect because of the structure of the industry. Who would have thought that purchasing agents are responsible for much of the problem? Yet they are trapped in the system and can’t change without creating huge problems for themselves (read: their own unemployment).
The first four fifths of the book are a brilliant expose of the food industry. It’s actually not so much of an expose as it is an accurate description of why the industry is locked into the way it is and why change is damn near impossible. The book shows why food manufacturers makes foods that make us fat, why the grocery stores are set up to beguile us into buying things we shouldn’t, and why restaurants trick us into ordering not what’s best for us, but what’s best for the restaurant’s bottom line.
The first four fifths more than justify the price of the book, which is a good thing because the last couple of chapters are pretty weak. Pretty weak, but not without their highlight moments, one of which we will soon see.
The last chapters are weak because, sadly, Mr. Cardello has bought into the idea that what really makes us fat is that we eat too many calories. In his mind, it doesn’t matter what those calories are made of, they’re all the same. Except for saturated fat, or course. He’s convinced that saturated fat will do us in. He has pretty much bought into the notion that fat and calories make us fat, and the last couple of chapters of the book are a compilation of his ideas as to how to change the food industry. He thinks that people love nasty processed food and they’re going to eat it no matter what, so why not make it lower in calories and lower in fat. Most of his ideas revolve around making smaller portion sizes and products with lower fat and calorie counts.
Why does he buy into all this? Because of Dr. Bray, among others.
Writes Mr. Cardello about a conference in which nutritional scientists sit down with food industry people to discuss how to solve the obesity problem:
It also was refreshing for me to listen to and learn from Dr. George Bray, the esteemed biomedical researcher and professor of medicine at Louisiana State Medical Center in Baton Rouge. To many insiders, he’s known as the founding father of the obesity issue. Bray is a doctor and scientist who has been practicing his craft for fifty-one years, and he still has the energy and curiosity of colleagues who are half his age. When he first began studying obesity, he was a doctor gently sounding a warning bell, but nobody was listening. The American population was about 14 percent overweight at the time. Now 30 percent of us are fat, so he said the problem has doubled since he began his work.
Now there is a backhanded compliment if I’ve ever seen one. I don’t think the author was being ironic, but it sure came out that way. And it corroborates my suspicions.
Bray truly has been a founding father of the obesity issue in ways that he probably doesn’t like. When he started working on the problem, the rate of obesity was 14 percent. After 51 years of effort on his part, the rate of obesity has more than doubled. That should tell anyone with sense enough to listen that Bray is a part of the problem, not a part of the solution.
Let’s imagine a world in which nutritional scientists actually pay attention to the growing mountain of studies showing that high-carbohydrate diets are bad and that low-carbohydrate diets do all the good things the readers of this blog know they do. Let’s imagine that these nutritional scientists make recommendations to the government to limit the advertising of carbohydrates in an effort to improve the health of the nation. Let’s imagine that people stores and restaurants started stocking and serving low-carb foods and that overweight people who were face down in the carbs were looked at with disdain. And let’s imagine that when someone suffers a heart attack or is obese, everyone says, well, he/she deserves it because he/she was a carbaholic.
If all this came to pass, public opinion would turn against high-carb consumption and my guess is that the obesity epidemic would end.
But is this all a pipe dream? Could it really happen? Not while Bray and friends are around ignoring the scientific evidence and continuing to push carbs on us all. But if these guys ever shuffle on off, there is a chance. It’s happened before.
Fifty years ago everyone and his brother smoked. It was the thing to do. When I was a kid my parents smoked and all my friends’ parents smoked. Every time I ate dinner, my mother had a cigarette going at one end of the table while my father had one going at the other. A haze of smoke always hung in our house. But I didn’t think anything of it because a haze of smoke hung in the houses of all my friends. Whenever I went someplace in the car with my parents or with the parents of my friends, the car was full of smoke. It was a way of life. As my mother – who is now a nonsmoker – never tires of telling me, back then if you didn’t smoke, you were considered some kind of freak.
If you watched TV at that time, it seemed that every show was sponsored by a cigarette company. It’s difficult to believe now how pervasive smoking and cigarette commercials were at that time. I’ve posted videos of a few of these commercials here and here. Everyone got into the act. Even the Beverly Hillbillies.
And actors.
And professional athletes.
There were no nonsmoking sections in restaurants. People smoked on planes and even in theaters. If you want to get some notion of what is was like, look at a few episodes of Prime Suspect, the terrific Brit detective series starring Helen Mirren. You can almost get nicotine toxic just watching. Granted, this series was filmed in the UK, but it presents smoking the way it was so widely done in the US a generation or two ago.
Now substantially fewer people smoke, and those who do are, for the most part, apologetic about it. Now there aren’t just nonsmoking sections in restaurants, the entire restaurant is nonsmoking. People can’t smoke in office buildings, public buildings, or much of anywhere else. There are no ads for cigarettes on TV or in magazines or newspapers and there are no billboards encouraging smoking. As far as smoking is concerned, it’s a different world.
What happened?
The scientific community figured out that smoking was a huge health problem. Scientists worked through the government to launch an enormous public health campaign to get people to quit smoking. It started with warnings on cigarette packages and went from there to a prohibition against advertising, first on television, then ultimately to just about everywhere else. And it has worked. Rates of smoking have plummeted, which is amazing considering how addictive nicotine is.
If this kind of scientific driven public health campaign can work to get people to give up a tremendously addictive and enjoyable habit, why wouldn’t it work to change the way people eat? I’m sure it would if it were ever initiated. But the problem is that as long as you have Bray and others telling the powers that be that the only thing causing the problem is calories and that carbs are wonderful, it never will happen.
When the public health campaign against smoking started, the only scientists who spoke out against it were those hired by the tobacco companies. And, of course, people realized that these spokesmen had a dog in the fight and pretty much ignored them.
Now we would have scientists who are not in the employ of the food industry who are telling us that carbs are good, fat is bad, and the reason we are all obese is simply that we eat too many calories and don’t exercise enough. As long as these people are spouting off, there will be no change.
Just like there were nonsmokers back then who bucked the trend (and were thought of as freaks by my mother and other smokers), there are those of us who buck the high-carb trend now (and are probably thought of as freaks by the rest of the population). We all have to rely on our own internal public health campaigns to keep us going.
I don’t know that there will ever be a public health campaign against the high-carb diet, but I know that if there is, it will work. If people can be broken from the chains of tobacco, they can certainly be weaned from carbs.
There has been a nutritional public health campaign of sorts, but unfortunately it has been misguided. Bray and others have gotten the government on board for a jihad against fat, particularly saturated fat. And, as anyone can see, the campaign has been successful. Sadly, they picked the wrong macronutrient to campaign against, as is evidenced by both the generalized fear of fat along with a doubling of the rate of obesity.
Public health campaigns do work. We’ve just got to work to get the right one.
Hat tip to Whole Health Source blog for the nutrient intake graphs
Dr. Eades,
Glad you found a good use for the graphs. I like your blog.
Thanks, Stephan. I enjoy your blog as well.
M
Saturday, 18 April
Henry VIII became the tyrannical monster remembered by history because of a personality change following a serious jousting accident, according to a new historical documentary.
After the accident – just before he became estranged from the second of his six wives, Anne Boleyn – the king, once sporty and generous, became cruel, vicious and paranoid, his subjects began talking about him in a new way, and the turnover of his wives speeded up.
The accident occurred at a tournament at Greenwich Palace on 24 January 1536 when 44-year-old Henry, in full armour, was thrown from his horse, itself armoured, which then fell on top of him. He was unconscious for two hours and was thought at first to have been fatally injured.
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But, although he recovered, the incident, which ended his jousting career, aggravated serious leg problems which plagued him for the rest of his life, and may well have caused an undetected brain injury which profoundly affected his personality, according to the History Channel documentary Inside the Body of Henry VIII. The programme focuses on the king’s medical problems which grew worse in his later years, especially his ulcerated legs and his obesity: measurements of his armour show that, between his 20s and his 50s, the 6ft 1in monarch’s waist grew from 32in to 52in, his chest expanded from 39in to 53in, and, by the time of his death in 1547 at the age of 56, he is likely to have weighed 28 stone.
Robert Hutchinson, a biographer of Henry; Catherine Hood, a doctor; and the historian Lucy Worsley, who is chief curator of Britain’s Historic Royal Palaces, offer a picture of a sovereign eventually overwhelmed by health problems by the time of his death. His doctors recorded that he had badly ulcerated legs, was unable to walk, his eyesight was fading, and he was plagued by paranoia and melancholy.
However, Henry had started out with excellent health as a young man, being universally admired for his manly physique. An ambassador at the Tudor court reported: “His Majesty is the most handsomest potentate I have ever set eyes on. Above the usual height with an extremely fine calf to his leg and a round face so very beautiful it would become a pretty woman.”
He may have had a bout of smallpox at the age of 23, but the experts speculate that his real medical problems began at the age of 30 when he appears to have contracted malaria, which is thought to have returned throughout his life. They were intensified by two factors: open sores on his legs and sporting injuries.
The sores – varicose ulcers, which began on his left leg when he was 36, and later affected his right – may have been caused by the restrictive garters he wore to show off his calves. They never healed, and increasingly restricted his mobility.
Henry also suffered various injuries because of his well-known love of sports – he excelled at pursuits such as archery, wrestling and real tennis, and, playing the latter game he seriously injured his foot.
But it was jousting – two armoured horsemen charging at each other with wooden lances in “the lists” – which proved the most dangerous. His first serious accident occurred in 1524 when he failed to lower the visor on his helmet and was hit by his opponent’s lance just above the right eye, after which he constantly suffered from migraines.
Jousting nearly killed him 12 years later. The fall at Greenwich left him “speechless” for two hours, and Anne Boleyn, the woman for whom he had divorced his original queen, Katherine of Aragon, was told that he would die – the shock of which news, she said, caused her to miscarry the child she was expecting. The miscarried baby was male, and it was immediately after this that Henry told Anne they would clearly never have male children together, and turned against her. Less than six months later Anne had been executed and Henry had married the third of his six wives, Jane Seymour.
But the jousting accident may have affected his whole personality, the experts suggest. “We posit that his jousting accident of 1536 provides the explanation for his personality change from sporty, promising, generous young prince, to cruel, paranoid and vicious tyrant,” Lucy Worsley says. “From that date the turnover of the wives really speeds up, and people begin to talk about him in quite a new and negative way. “After the accident he was unconscious for two hours; even five minutes of unconsciousness is considered to be a major trauma today.” Henry may have suffered a brain injury, Dr Worsley says. “Damage to the frontal lobe of the brain can perfectly well result in personality change.”
What is beyond doubt is that the end of his jousting combined with his leg ulcers to restrict his movement and Henry, who had a large appetite anyway, began to put on weight rapidly. The programme reconstructs his diet, suggesting he may have eaten up to 13 dishes a day, the majority comprising meat such as lamb, chicken, beef, game, rabbit, and a variety of birds like peacock and swan, and he may have drunk 10 pints of ale a day as well as wine, as water was unsafe.
Henry, the programme says, “became a comfort-eating paranoid recluse – a 28 stone man-mountain.”
i generated a similar graph using the data on obesity and overweight people in the U.S. just the other day. it is sad that over 65% of all people are above 25 BMI
I’m a positive person so I’m going to point out what I HAVE been noticing at the grocery store. TONS more ‘no sugar added’ options. Some might be against these because they’re with SPLENDA, but I happen to love the stuff. I see just as many low-fat options still, but for example yesterday I was perusing the chocolate toppings to go on my Carb Smart icecream (I’m pregnant, give me a break) and next to the no fat fudge topping was the no sugar added hot fudge topping. Who would want to eat no fat fudge?! Gag. Such a waste of shelf space! There’s also no sugar added Hershey’s syrup now! I don’t eat these things much, but it’s nice to have a replacement and now I don’t notice the difference b/w Splenda sweet and sugar sweet, except that the real sugar gives me a headache now. Dr. Eades, any thoughts on why real sugar now gives me a headache? I tend to notice this because it’s only on occasion, like after a piece of cake at a birthday party. Just wondering if you have a scientific answer for that?
Also noticed that Tropicana just came out with an orange juice with no artificial sweeteners in it but the sugar is cut in half. Trop 50 is what it’s called. It has something called Reb A in it, do you know what that is?
Reb A is the substance in stevia that gives it its sweetness. It’s a natural sweetener.
Wow, everyone, thanks for all the feedback! This is all super helpful. I’ll suggest to her the idea about the glucose meter. Seems like that would be helpful for anyone, just to know how various foods affect us. And for such an inexpensive price, why not?
Tom– Yes, I’m familiar with the “induction flu,” as you called it. I always adjusted fairly quickly to ketosis– usually only feeling down on energy for a few days at most, and then hitting an energy high. But as I’ve gone over some of the literature, it appears, more in line with what you said, that it can sometimes take anywhere from 2 to 6 weeks to fully adjust.
Also, in going over some of this stuff to try determining the acclimation time period, I was looking again at this study in Nutrition & Metabolism: http://www.nutritionandmetabolism.com/content/1/1/2. In it, at the conclusion, it states:
“Therapeutic use of ketogenic diets should not require constraint of most forms of physical labor or recreational activity, with the one caveat that anaerobic (ie, weight lifting or sprint) performance is limited by the low muscle glycogen levels induced by a ketogenic diet, and this would strongly discourage its use under most conditions of competitive athletics.”
Dr. Eades (or anyone else who knows), I love being in ketosis, but have been thinking of getting back to some weight lifting. How does this conclusion affect that? Does weight lifting require the “strategic” use of some carbohydrates? I remember back in the day when I used to do a lot of weight lifting, I would have a dextrose/maltodextrin/protein drink post-workout (in what’s known as the “window of opportunity”) for a shot of insulin, to get protein synthesis going, refill glycogen stores, etc. I like to do High Intensity Training for no more than 30 minutes, a couple times per week. How does a low carb lifestyle fit in with that? Is it still a good idea to throw in some carbs due to the glycogen demands, or is there a way around this?
Just read some comments, I learn just as much from the comment sections a lot of times! Happy to hear some answers about already thin(ish) people with hypoglycemia. My new stylist started talking about how she was hypoglycemic and I didn’t go much into the low carbing conversation because I didn’t know enough about the connection there. I figured low carbing must help in some way, of course.
As always, a very informative and insightful post!!
Seeing that advertisement with Ronald Reagan brings to mind how he kicked the smoking habit. Two words: Jelly Belly. Nothing like replacing one bad habit with another…hmmmm!
Until next time,
Jean
David,
I also agree with the suggestion that your sister try using a glucometer to see what is happening with her BG. She should use the test strips liberally for a while to generate enough data to get an accurate picture (graphing is great). That’s what I did, with a lot of help from Jenny’s excellent website Blood Sugar 101.
I’m another normal weight person who has glucose regulation problems if I eat high carb foods with sugar and starch. For a long time (until age 29) I was actually underweight and really wanted to gain some weight, but found it difficult, and I thought I could eat anything I wanted (though I mostly craved carbs). Then all of a sudden, in a year I gained about 20 pounds, 2/3 of which I welcomed (finally had a few curves). I think the gestational diabetes diagnosis should have been a clue, but it wasn’t. I LC’d in the final trimester with great success, but went back to my carbs after the birth, a big mistake. More weight crept on when I bought a bread machine and got into baking pizza, bread, and making homemade pasta! When I hit 140 pounds (5’3″), it hit me that the carbs were the issue. I was back to the low 120s in 5 mos by cuttign carbs, and subbing non-starchy veggies, plus being more generous with protein and fat than before. Now I’m even grain-free and consume very little sugar and I don’t really even miss them much.
One thing I learned what that even though I still have normal Fasting BG (90-100), my BG went really high (140-275) after eating common carb-rich foods (now I stay under 110 almost all the time after eating). The feeling that I needed more carbs (cravings, jitteriness, intense hunger, lack of energy, fatigue) really felt like low BG, but the glucometer told me my BG had already peaked and was on its way down (rapidly), but was actually *still quite high* (perhaps 180-150). So my body was saying, “eat more carbs, BG is low”, when it was very clear from frequent glucose testing that I still had a lot of toxic glucose to clear from my bloodstream. Sugar and starch makes the regulatory system very screwy and the messages it gives us are not always accurate.
It’s clear to me now that my first phase insulin response (which starts secretion of stored insulin at the first bite or even before smelling and anticipating carb-rich foods) is shot or inadequate (unknown reason). So 45 minutes or so after starting to eat, my pancreas starts the second phase insulin – realtime production of insulin. Like the calvary, it rushes in to mop up the toxic excess glucose, but often overshoots the mark and then the roller coaster BG cycle really gets going. It’s awful, for me and anyone else around me, because I get short on patience, etc. I am so glad to be free of that “carb grip” now.
Good luck with your discussions with your sister. I know how resistant people can sometimes be with this issue, until they are ready to make changes and see things differently.
Hello, Dr. Eades. Essentially, I stick to a paleo/low carb eating pattern (at least I try, though not always successfully), so I understand that too much carbs is bad but what about fat, especially from plant sources: I’m speaking about olive oil and oils from nuts (walnut, hazelnut)? Should I refrain from consuming them?
My rule on fats is that if they can be gotten by pressing the subtsance they come from, i.e., olives, nuts, etc., I don’t mind them in fairly small doses. Coconut oil and palm oil and palm kernal oil, I consume in fairly large quantities as we cook with those. But I avoid all fats that have to be chemically extracted, i.e., corn oil mainly.
Off on a tangent: From reading these comments I picked up on the concept of an “Induction Flu.” Is this possibly a Herxheimer reaction? The idea that your new low-carb body isn’t conducive to some of your old bacteria makes sense but from what I’ve read the “Induction Flu” is viewed as direct reaction low blood sugar levels.
Until people started commenting on this, I had never heard of ‘induction flu.’ I don’t think it’s a reaction to any kind of bacterial kill off, in fact, based on work with thousands of patients on low-carb diets, I’m not sure exists.
Anna, are we related? (grins) we have several people in the family that have the markers for obesity (lipids, BG, blood pressure) while remaining skinny, it appears to be insulin resistance behind this but somehow unrelated to weight gain. Lipids may be a clue, especially trigs/HDL ratio.
I probably never had a proper Phase 1 response since childhood but 50 years later my Phase 2 can still drop my BG like a stone if I let it go high in the first place, and it’s the rate of change that brings on the hypo symptoms.
Agree on the testing, this was my paradigm
http://loraldiabetes.blogspot.com/2009/04/test-test-test.html
except it may help to start 1/2 hour postprandial and go out to three or four hours to see the full peak to peak swing.
I seem to be well able to run on ketones and generate all the glucose I need from protein without the peaks and dips caused by trying to bolus carbs. High protein moderate fat and low carbs for breakfast, and probably higher fat during the rest of the day seems to keep me most even with more energy – and keeps the lipids normalised no matter that it freaks out my GP
I’m pretty sure that the “induction flu” being discussed is nothing more than another name for the bad feeling at the beginning of a low-carb diet when the body is switching over (but not yet fully acclimated) to a fat metabolism. This is just kind of a weak, worn down (and temporary!) feeling that nearly everyone I know who has gone on a low-carb diet experiences from one degree to another.
Agree with David, also it seems to vary in intensity between individuals probably depending on their carb intolerance at the time (insulin resistance) and is very likely associated with running high BG over a period of time as many Type 2s do before diagnosis: the body panics when BG drops to a normal level, and panics more until it works out how to generate glucose from protein and run on ketones instead.
After that all settles down, well I’ve noticed a major improvement in endurance and while I still carry sweets and other carbs as hypostop for emergencies I haven’t needed to hit them for ages now, and my snacking has reduced severely. Occasionally I will need to stuff some carbs after relatively high intensity exercise, but in general my pancreas and liver now work cooperatively.
It’s worth pointing out something you may not realise (I didn’t until it was pointed out to me, so I’m passing it along): the total blood volume only contains around 5g glucose at any one time, so there’s major work going on in the background stashing dietary glucose into store and retrieving it into the blood on demand, one system is the pancreatic beta cells producing insulin, the other is the pancreatic alpha cells generating glucagon. There only needs to be a 5g glucose disparity between these systems for your BG to double.
Food for thought!
I posted on this very subject a long while ago.
Dr. Eades, I am a devoted reader of your blogs and books and I can’t tell you how much I appreciate all I’ve learned from you and your wife. Now that I’ve buttered you up, a question. I live in NYC, and as I’m sure you know there is a fair amount of panic here over the swine flu. If you were living in the blast zone, what precautions might you take? Thanks. S.L.
I think the panic is a little overkill. Events like these always remind me of the great quote from H.L. Mencken:
The same applies to the media. This really gives them something to get their teeth into. But I think a recent headline from the BBC says it all:
If you’re concerned, keep protein and fat intake up since those are the substrate of your immune system. And make sure to take at least 5,000 IU of vitamin D3 per day. That’s how I’m dealing with it.
I probably should put up a post about this.
“I posted on this very subject a long while ago.”
So sue me, I’m a slow reader, haven’t gotten back to 2005 yet (grins)
That’s an excellent post, now added to my list of cites for newbie diabetics.
Glad you enjoyed it.
Why does nicotine gum cessation cause weight gain when my diet hasn’t changed.?
Because nicotine is a stimulant. Whenever you take away a stimulant, your metabolic rate falls. When your metabolic rate falls, you gain weight on the same amount of food. That’s why people gain weight when they stop smoking.
This is a magnificent post and glad it was linked from… I think Hyperlipid, I can’t remember. I’m glad I discovered it. There are more than a few posts that you have dating back to 2008 and earlier that simply cover a very pertinent issue from every angle, and would be submitted as evidence in a trial to find the real culprit/cause of obesity, if one ever does take place. This piece is definitely one of them.
Other than comb through all of your archives, please allow me to ask you to consider perhaps doing a post of links for blasts from the past posts to catch up some of your newer readers… maybe when you’re busy with your other projects when you know you’ll be out on the road for a few weeks? I’ve been reading your work well over a year, and am still finding new things here that stand alone and tie back into points made in Protein Power Life Plan. Muchos danka, have a great day.
I’ve been planning on doing just what you suggest at some point. Maybe you’ll be the inspiration for me to get it done.
Truly obesity and overweight is environmental in nature. And of course lifestyle. While the community and environment produces more food with more carbohydrates then people simply tend to eat them and more of them and thus making them obese. The right education that would educate society and the market in general will help individuals overcome obesity.
[...] YOU'RE FIRED! Writes Mr. Cardello about a conference in which nutritional scientists sit down with food industry [...]