You might think...

... that after a while, the chorus of inaccurate information would be drowned in the sea of evidence. MSNBC's Health Today posted an article four days ago (I've been busy) on Paula Deen's diabetes. They basically say the same old tired non-sense about how it has nothing to do with what you eat, that if you only maintain your weight and exercise more you won't get diabetes, unless of course you are predisposed to it because of genetics.

What’s important when it comes to diabetes prevention is not what you eat, but rather, how much, said Linda Siminerio, director of the Diabetes Institute at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.

“To my knowledge no particular food has been linked to an increase in the risk of diabetes,” Siminerio said. “It’s being overweight and inactive.”

Linda Siminerio ought to be ashamed of herself. How does one become director of a Diabetes Institute without having a grasp on biochemistry? What in the hell does she think makes people gain weight? What food could be cut out to make them lose weight effortlessly? I'll give you three guesses. Carbohydrates(!) make you gain weight (if you are insulin resistant). End of discussion.

Excessive carbohydrate intake (along with damage to your mitochondria, maybe from eating trans-fats or all the fake processed crap or something else unknown or all of the above) exacerbate insulin resistance, which in time leads to diabetes. See! I understand that and I'm a freakin' artist. I'm probably more qualified than she is to talk about what diabetics and those at risk of diabetes ought to eat. Why? Because I have a brain, some common sense, and can look at the data and draw a conclusion. Ms. Siminerio on the other hand is beholden to the "establishment". She can't say anything that hasn't already been dictated or she'd probably lose her cushy position as director of some Institute on Something.

Oh, but you say, "Some people eat carbohydrates and they don't get fat or get diabetes." And I say, that's fantastic for them. The bottom line is, if your metabolism is "broken" you can't eat carbohydrates. I know, it's very sad. I like brioche and donuts as much as the next person. But like recovering alcoholics liking their alcohol, I know that if I eat them, I will gain all the weight back.

Here's the deal. Doctors and these "experts" are just humans. Half of them probably aren't even as smart as the average person. In fact, I've come to the conclusion that none of them have even half the common sense of your average American. That's a sad state of affairs. I've seen day laborers with more sense than Ms. Siminerio and her "expert" friends.

I'm rambling now, and I have a ton of other things to do than rage about the stupidity of people. How many more people have to DIE before these asshats stop spreading lies and misinformation? >_<

I'll leave you with something heartening, on the way home today, I saw a sign at a local Tex Mex place that said "Low Carb Plate $7.95" :)

Vegan Bacon

At Hunter-Gatherer.

Who would eat such crap? That's what I'm asking. Look, I've said it before and I'll say it again, if you want to wreck your health being vegan, well fine. Go for it, but why would you eat something that is manufactured by some corporation and that doesn't even resemble food?

Veganism is one of THE stupidest things that exist, and the people who follow it like a religion are even stupider. I understand if you do it for "ethical" reasons (which I think is misguided but whatever), but it certainly ought not be for "health" reasons since it's one of the most unhealthful diets you can eat, right after the Standard American Diet. I blame the lack of saturated fat. Saturated fat is really important for developing and maintaining cognitive function. So is cholesterol, but I digress.

The thing that really burns my biscuits though, is that vegans act like theirs is the natural diet man is supposed to be eating. This couldn't be further from the truth. Do you think that paleolithic man had greens, bananas and other stuff that only grows for part of the year in most places, shipped to them from a tropical location? They ate meat and lots of it. Some archaeologists think that paleolithic people were partially responsible for the mass extinction of mega-fauna at the end of the paleolithic.

If one wanted to be "ethical" about the way we treat this planet, they would eat local. They'd eat what was in their back yard. Of course, that would require having a back yard. I despise living in a city. I've done it, and I really don't like it. The only place I despise living more is in the suburbs. The neighbors are always a bunch of wackos.

If you eat vegan bacon, I'd suggest finding some real food to eat instead. The ingredient list on this vegan bacon reads like any other crap-in-a-box you might find in the frozen food section. Hint: soybean oil is very bad for you

It's all Taubes fault...

...that none of my clothes fit. They're all too damned big on me now!

Gary Taubes was on the Dr. Oz show today, and while I haven't watched the whole thing yet because our internet is god-awful and I can't get it to load completely (why is it unacceptable to be able to download videos? streaming never works on a slow connection!). Anyway, one of the first things that Dr. Oz says is that what Taubes is saying disagrees with his BELIEFS. And this is why I have a general distrust of doctors. Belief should have nothing to do with science. There is evidence. There is sometimes uncertainty and we fill that in with what we *think* may be right, but to act as if your belief should trump everything, as Dr. Oz has basically done is downright stupid and dangerous.

The other thing that gets me is when these doctors flaunt their credentials. Your credentials and .75 cents will buy you a cup of coffee. "You're not a doctor." Yeah, and you're not a fucking biochemist. Asshole.

"I feel very strongly..." --Dr. Oz

Yeah, and the Pope feels very strongly that Jesus Christ is the savior of mankind and was born of a Virgin, but ask any Hindu or Muslim what they feel about that. Diet should again, have NOTHING to do with BELIEF. This isn't a religion. Or it shouldn't be anyway. Oz even calls high carbohydrate foods sacred!

And then Oz goes into how you can't live on meat and eggs. Like hell. I could eat steak with a huge whopping pat of butter on it every damned meal. You can keep your rice cakes, thanks.

edit:

I've managed to watch the whole thing now that it's loaded, and I'd like to reiterate that Dr. Oz repeatedly refers to high carb foods as "sacred". Again, a religion. I suppose that appeals to some people's sense of good, and right, and not-being-able-to-think-for-yourself. I also found it amusing that Post cereal is one of the sponsors of Dr. Oz's show. So basically, like every other television personality, Dr. Oz is beholden to corporate interests or he won't have a show.

I'd really like to see Uffe Ravnskov on Dr. Oz. It would be like celebrity death match, and I could go for that. I'm banking on Uffe winning. There's a reason why body builders eat paleo.

The interesting thing I found reading some of the comments over at Taubes' blog, is that Dr. Oz was diagnosed with pre-colon cancer. Maybe he should have read Dr. Eades blog on why fiber may cause colon cancer.

If you want to watch the video, the first part is here.

Frankenfood

Is what you're eating real or is it frankenfood?

Listening to an Interview with David Gumpert by Jimmy Moore over at Livin' La Vida Low-Carb about raw milk, I wanted to tell a funny story about a kid who grew up on a dairy farm, as related by the dairy farmer we get our raw milk from.

If for one minute you think that the milk you buy in the store is anything like the milk that comes out of a cow, you've never had fresh milk directly from a cow. Luckily we live in Texas, where you are allowed (as if it should even be a question) to buy raw-milk directly from a dairy. There is also recent legislation to make it legal for dairies to sell their products off the farm, i.e. in towns and cities where most people live.

The dairy farmer we get our raw milk from told us how their kid, on the first day of school, received a carton of milk in the lunch room. He took a sip, and took it back up to the lunch ladies and told them it had gone bad. They gave him another carton, he drank a sip of it, and promptly took it back up as well. It tasted bad to him. At that point, they realized he was a dairy farmers' kid, and gave him chocolate milk for the rest of the time he was in school there. Why? Because pasteurized-homogenized-transported-hundreds-of-miles milk is simply bad milk. I'm not saying that all milk should be raw, rather anything produced in a large industrial dairy has to be pasteurized, because they're not clean. Local small dairies are clean though, so there's no reason why they shouldn't be allowed to sell their product.

A little history, pasteurization came about because people did used to get very sick off of raw milk. Back then they did not understand germ theory, did not have antibiotics, and did not have sanitation or refrigeration either. Pasteurization made milk safe to drink for city people in an age of no refrigeration. We on the other hand, living in the 21st century, have sanitation, we understand bacteria and how disease is transmitted, and we have refrigeration as well. It is perfectly safe to drink raw milk because of this. Sometimes we get caught up living in this advanced era, and forget that as late as the civil war doctors did not know how disease spread, and killed many soldiers they were trying to save because they did not wash their hands between procedures. That was only 150 years ago. One of the first to discover that washing your hands might prevent the spread of disease was Ignaz Semmelweis, who discovered this in the mid 19th century, and was thought to be a quack and was ridiculed by his contemporaries. So much for knowing so much.

The moral of this story? Real, fresh food doesn't taste like anything you find in the store. It's like the fresh green beans we grow in the summer. They're so much better than anything you find in the store, even ones from the produce department, because they haven't been transported a thousand miles. When we can't eat them all, we freeze them, and they then aren't as good. Doing things like canning, and freezing food, changes the taste. It doesn't take a big leap of the imagination to realize that it probably changes the vitamin content and the overall healthful nature of the food too.

The Misconception of Natural Sweeteners

Lots of things are natural, meaning they occur in nature. Arsenic, cyanide, uranium, deadly nightshade. That doesn't mean you'd want to eat them, or even come into contact with some of them. I don't know how many articles I have read decrying the evils of High Fructose Corn Syrup, and yet saying that regular sugar is fine. Now, I'm not saying that HFCS is the same as sugar, it's not, by a long shot, however, neither of them are good for your health. Other naturally occurring sugars are no better, like honey. Sugar is sugar, and the glucose spikes your blood sugar while the fructose portion damages your liver and raises your triglyceride levels. That includes the fructose in fruit.

We have articles in newspapers like this one, since it's Valentine's day:

"But let's not make fructose the only bad guy here. The real problem is our consumption of all added sugar. Naturally occurring sugars like fructose, found in fruit, and lactose, found in milk, are valuable nutrients."

Overall, this article is better than most, but still has some problems. It fails in that it differentiates the fructose in fruit from the fructose in HFCS. There's not one iota of a difference, with perhaps the exception that if you ate a piece of fruit you might get less than if you ate something laden with HFCS. The problem is, our modern fruit has been bred to be bigger and sweeter. The sweeter it is, the more fructose is in it. Also, the fructose found in sucrose (table sugar) is also the same to your cells.

The problem is, they can't let go of the notion, that "everybody knows it's common knowledge" notion, that fruit is good for you. Five hundred years ago everyone knew the earth was flat too, and the center of the universe to boot. We all know what happened to Galileo when he dared to suggest otherwise.

"Does this research mean that eating fruit will increase your risk of heart disease and diabetes? Absolutely not."

That statement may be blatantly false, considering the study out of New Zealand that I wrote about last week, that I might add no American media picked up (good thing I didn't hold my breath).

Another newspaper article, also acts like natural sweeteners aren't a problem:

"While the massive amount of high-fructose corn syrup consumed by many people isn't a great choice, a more moderate amount of natural sweeteners can be a wonderful complement to a healthy diet."

What exactly is their idea of "moderation"? Eating 100 lbs of sugar a year versus the current 150+? Taubes wrote about this in "Good Calories, Bad Calories" and it seems from some reports by doctors who were in Africa and other colonial places a hundred years ago that a sugar intake of approximately 60 lbs was the cut off point of "too much". After consumption rose above that level, and after a time frame of about 20 years consuming such levels, they saw diabetes and metabolic syndrome begin to develop, along with all the other western diseases that go along with them. And really, it might be that a lower consumption just means it takes longer to develop metabolic problems in some people, or maybe even in most people. I doubt seriously the authors of these news articles imagine that we really might need to restrict our sugar intake to a minuscule amount to avoid developing disease.

The first article I cited did have a great line in it:

"If we really looked like what we eat, most Americans would look like kernels of corn."

There's the truth if I ever read it.

Cognitive Dissonance and Obesity Research

After reading about obesity in children, since it's Heart Month there's a ton of obesity articles in general going around, I got to looking for scientific journals on the subject. One of the better articles is "Obese babies and young children: an approach to paedratric management" from the British journal Paediatrics and Child Health, Volume 19, Issue 9, Sept 2009, pages 425-429.

They actually say that the "energy in/energy out" that is used to justify why people should be blamed for being overweight is "too simplistic an explanation..." They even mention insulin insensitivity (resistance) as predisposing a child to gain weight. Amazing!

And then what do they do? They go on to say that "Hormonal causes of obesity are also extraordinarily rare." and "...however, at present identifiable metabolic and hormonal causes are exceptionally rare." I'm hoping that they're excluding insulin from this, as last I checked, insulin is a hormone and is very much responsible for most people's weight problems.

Later in the article they elucidate one reason why people may not be motivated to change their lifestyle.

"Unfortunately research shows that parents too often find that health professionals (and particularly doctors and dieticians) are critical, judgemental, blame them for their child's obesity, make them feel guilty, or are dismissive."

Well no duh! Especially when most nutritionists and people in general act like it's your fault that you're fat or your kid is fat. When you're eating corn syrup and sugar from the first day of life, what do you expect to happen? This isn't their fault, it's what they're being told to eat. It's what they're being told to feed their children.

"Babies are born with a natural ‘fuel gauge’ which signals when enough has been eaten. Unfortunately this gauge is often overridden by the way children are fed, which contributes to the development of obesity."

I don't think it's the way they're being fed, I think it's what they're being fed. They still talk of limiting food intake, contradicting what they said at the beginning of the article about how "calories in/calories out" was too simplistic of an explanation. They do say to avoid juice and stick with food that are of a low glycemic index, which is good, but I think doesn't go far enough. This is cognitive dissonance, which runs rampant through the field of dietary and obesity research. I guess old habits die hard.

Unintended Consequences: Salt Intake, Obesity and Insulin Resistance

When William Banting wrote his Letter on Corpulence in 1863, the medical community attacked him like piranhas in a lake filled with hemophiliac swimmers. Gary Taubes describes this best in his book Good Calories, Bad Calories:

"The medical community of Banting's day didn't quite know what to make of him or his diet. Correspondents to the British Medical Journal seemed occasionally open-minded, albeit suitably skeptical; a formal paper was presented on the efficacy and safety of Banting's diet at the 1864 meeting of the British Medical Association. Others did what members of established societies often do when confronted with a radical new concept: they attacked both the message and the messenger. The editors of The Lancet, which is to the BMJ what Newsweek is to Time, were particularly ruthless. First, they insisted that Banting's diet was old news, which it was, although Banting never claimed otherwise. The medical literature, wrote The Lancet, "is tolerably complete, and supplies abundant evidence that all which Mr. Banting advises has been written over and over again." Banting responded that this might well have been so, but it was news to him and other corpulent individuals." [emphasis mine]

It was news to me as well. No one told me that I should eat that way. But what else was news to me is this, apparently restricting sodium intake can cause and/or aggravate insulin resistance. In a country with what some call a "diabetes epidemic" why are nutritionists still advocating restricting sodium intake? Especially when lower salt intake does little for lowering blood pressure, which is why it's pushed on the general public in the first place. One review found that a reduction in dietary sodium would amount to systolic blood pressure being lowered by a whopping mean of 1.1 mmHg, and diastolic by an even more underwhelming mean of 0.6 mmHg.

I suppose part of it may be because it seems a lot of the studies done were published in a journal called American Journal of Hypertension over the last 20(!) years, and I guess the "experts" and the "nutritionists" don't read it. I mean, don't read period. Because if they did, they'd have read Taubes and the plethora of other studies that would tell them that what they're telling people is flat out wrong and is killing them.

Not only can salt restriction apparently be bad for insulin resistance, but one study showed giving people more salt helps alleviate it and makes them more sensitive to the insulin.

"For the group as a whole, urinary sodium excretion increased on sodium chloride to 267 ± 118 mEq/day versus control (placebo) phase of 135 ± 53 mEq/day, P < .001. Total glycemic response in the oral GTT (area under the glucose curve) was 8.0% lower during sodium supplementation, P < .001. Secondary analysis revealed that the effect of sodium was noteworthy in 1) type 2 diabetic subjects (n = 8), 2) sodium -sensitive subjects (n = 10), and 3) nondiabetic subjects receiving antihypertensive drug treatment (n = 6). The total insulinemic response to oral GTT was also lowered by sodium loading among diabetic subjects. Thus, an abundant sodium intake may improve glucose tolerance and insulin resistance, especially in diabetic, salt-sensitive, and or medicated essential hypertensive subjects." [emphasis mine]

(The effect of sodium supplementation on glucose tolerance and insulin concentrations in patients with hypertension and diabetes mellitus, from the American Journal of Hypertension, Volume 14, Issue 7, July 2001, Pages 653-659)

One of the most recent and largest studies from the journal Metabolism, took data from 152 healthy people who were prescribed a high or low salt diet. It too found that a low salt diet was associated with increased insulin resistance.

People are expensive to do studies on. You have to pay them to participate. Lab rats on the other hand are cheap and you don't have to pay them anything and you get to dissect them when the study is over so you can obtain even more information on what was going on physiologically. One rat study found:

"In the present study, higher body weight, blood glucose, plasma insulin, triacylglycerols (triglycerides) and cholesterol, hematocrit and heart rate were observed in animals on low salt intake compared to the normal-salt group. Blood pressure and glucose uptake were lower on low-than on normal-salt diet." [emphasis mine]

(Insulin resistance due to chronic salt restriction is corrected by α and β blockade and by l-arginine, from Physiology & Behavior, Volume 88, Issues 4-5, 30 July 2006, Pages 364-370)


If you've been paying attention, insulin resistance (and by extension diabetes) is associated with obesity. Apparently one study showed that restricting salt intake in female Wistar rats predisposed their female offspring to obesity.

Most of the studies say that more and larger studies are needed. As mentioned above, studies are expensive. There were some studies in humans that found the opposite or no correlation between salt intake and insulin resistance, but of these I saw, they used a very small number of people, in one only eight and were very short term. That's not enough subjects or time to get meaningful data. We need large studies with lots of people, that way individual variation is controlled for. All of the rat studies I found showed a correlation with low salt intake and insulin resistance, and since rats are cheap, there were more rats involved than people. It may be that some people are not as effected by low sodium intake as others.

So here we have unintended consequences, in that nutritionists are advocating you messing with your diet for what might amount to a slightly lower blood pressure, at the expense of something else completely unforeseen. How do you like being an unwitting participant in one of the biggest health studies ever made? Because that's what you are if you live in any country that follows the dietary guidelines set forth by the USDA. You may think you have no problem eating as you are, but the food manufacturers have made it a point to remove salt and fat from the food they sell you. So unless you are making a concerted effort to add it back in, you may well be deficient and not even know it.

Common sense is indeed not very common. If excess salt intake had anything to do with ill health, the human race in western Europe and elsewhere would not have survived into the modern era. Last I checked, prior to the 20th century, people did not have refrigeration and used, get this, salt and LOTS of it to cure meat. I doubt there's any way to find out exactly how much they consumed, but it was way more than we do now. And since we don't have reports that medieval people were dropping dead from stroke or heart disease (plague is another matter), I dare say the salt wasn't a primary cause of mortality. Of course, absense of evidence is not evidence of absence, and maybe they just didn't live long enough for the salt to kill them.

In the beginning...

In the beginning God created journalists. And they were real journalists, in that they rooted out the truth and gave it to the general public. But then somehow things changed, as they usually do, and journalists became beholden to corporate interests. And they stopped telling you (the public) the truth and began telling you what they thought was the truth. Or rather, what they thought ought to be the truth. It may not have been entirely their fault. They were lied to. But instead of investigating whether what they were told was a lie or not, they accepted it at face value. Perhaps the scent of money to be had made them shut their eyes and their ears and accept the lies. I suppose the glint of silver does that to a person.

We know it's a lie. Gary Taubes has shown us all that. The man deserves a nobel prize.

What pisses me off, is that I was lied to. Isn't that how it usually is? Humans are very self-centered creatures for the most part. I was told all my life that I ate too much, and that was why I was fat. In my case though, I now know that's not true and I can do something about it. I've lost about forty pounds since I read Taubes' book last May.

The same can't be said for the millions of dead. That's not hyperbole either. Almost everyone who has died of complications from diabetes in the last thirty years might have been saved if they'd only been told the truth, instead of to "eat more fruit." That includes my mother's best friend, who lost her leg before she lost her life some years ago now.

The lies go on almost every day in the press and on the daily news or morning show, and people continue to believe them. And until the lie is stopped, we'll have more dead best friends, more dead mothers, more dead sisters, etc... It doesn't have to be this way.