Archives for October 2008

Type 2 Diabetes Rate Doubles

October 30, 2008 2 Comments

Reader Bud sends along this link. Some highlights:

The rate of new diabetes cases nearly doubled in the United States in the last 10 years, with the highest levels in the South, the government said Thursday in its first state-by-state review of new diagnoses. […]
About 90 percent of the cases are Type 2 diabetes, the form linked to obesity. The findings echo geographic trends seen with obesity and physical inactivity, which are also tied to heart disease. Southern states rank worst in those measures, too. […]
More than 23 million Americans have diabetes. The number is growing quickly. About 1.6 million new cases were diagnosed in people 20 or older last year, according to the CDC. […]
The annual rate of new diabetes cases rose from about 5 per 1,000 in the mid-1990s to 9 per 1,000 in the mid-2000s […]

Now stop and think about this. What has been the single most common diet drone over the last 10-20 years? Low fat, low fat, and more low fat. Low fat products line the shelves, the fat calories replaced with high fructose corn syrup and other carbohydrate, and as you look around you it's becoming just ridiculous how many grossly obese people there are…many thinking they're still eating too much fat.

And not to get too political, especially now (can we please get this election over with?), but some of you want universal health care? You want to pay for this? Are you insane? Can't you see where this is headed?

And how unnecessary. Everything anyone needs to cure and eliminate their Type 2 diabetes is right here on this blog, and other blogs. Plenty of them. It can be done in a matter of weeks, even if you want to eat only plants.

And yet, "the authorities" wax on about what a mystery this all is. Guess they'll just need to pick your pockets for more millions, for more useless studies in the forever vain attempt to confirm the fantastical falsehood that this has anything to do with saturated fat. It doesn't, and anyone who's taken a hard, honest look at it ought to know good and damn well it doesn't.

Carbohydrate drives insulin drives fat storage (Taubes). Eventually your insulin receptors get tired from overuse, you get resistant, it takes more and more to shunt toxic glucose (carbs) away from your muscle tissues by storing it in fat cells, and voila, you're a Type 2 diabetic. How do you reverse it? You knock out the grains, sugar, and all the derivative junk products that bulk out the center isles of the supermarket. You eat meat of any kind in any amount, its fat in any amount, vegetables smothered in butter, fruit bathed in heavy cream, and some nuts if you like. Within a few months you'll have lost tons of weight if you were fat, and as those fat stores diminish you'll gradually notice a profound change in your appetite and eating habits. You quit thinking about food all the time, and you're almost never very hungry, and even if you are, you'll find you can easily go hours and hours without eating, cause you're busy doing something more important.

The report only asked about diagnosed diabetes. Because an estimated 1 in 4 diabetics have not been diagnosed, the findings probably underestimate the problem, Liese said.

The underestimates may be particularly bad in the rural South and other areas where patients have trouble getting health care, she noted.

They wouldn't need such health care in the first place, but for the "health" authorities who've assured them for years that they need to cut the fat. And, of course, this was an opening for all the purveyors of the processed crap in your local supermarket.

The government-industry low-fat juggernaut is literally killing people.

Good Books Page

October 29, 2008 1 Comment

I've created a static page that I can edit over time with worthwhile books about food, diet, cooking, exercise, and intermittent fasting. It's quite spare in terms of design, so it can only improve over time.

Thanks to Lisbon, Portugal reader Richard Carvalho for kindly compiling this for me.

What Causes Heart Disease?

October 27, 2008 11 Comments

In a mental exercise I posted yesterday, I asked readers to speculate as to the order of most likely cause of heart disease and death from myocardial infarction.

The facts are that death by MI was unheard of in 1910 (about 100 years ago), had risen to 3,000 deaths per year by 1930, and to 500,000 by 1960. Then I provided eight food group categories, A – H, and indicated how much each had changed over the last 100 years, but without telling you which group was which. So here we go:

A; sugar and sweeteners: 100% increase
B; eggs, fruit (excl. citrus), vegetables, whole grain: Moderate decrease
C; lowfat milk: 100% increase
D; whole (full fat) milk: 50% decrease
E; butter, lard, tallow: 70% decrease (30 lbs. per person per year to under 10)
F; vegetable oils (incl. hydrogenated): 437% increase (11 lbs. pppy to 59)
G; poultry: 280% increase (18 lbs. pppy to 70)
H; beef; 46% increase (54 lbs. pppy to 79)

So, if one were to simply line it up by the numbers, the order would be like this:

Massive increase in vegetable oil consumption.
Huge increase in poultry consumption.
Large increase in sugar and sweeteners.
Large increase in low fat milk consumption.
Large decrease in animal fat consumption (butter, lard, tallow).
Moderate decrease in whole, full fat milk consumption.
Moderate increase in beef consumption.
Moderate decrease in eggs, fruit, vegetables and whole grains.

Of course, this is missing junk and highly processed foods.

Now, I agree with the commenter on the previous post. This does not establish causality. And yet, how many decades has it been now that the "health" establishment has been telling you, as though it was certain, that meat and saturated fat are the causes of heart disease? If they even mention junk food, pastries, and all manner of stuff loaded with flour and sugar, it's not those: It's the fat.

It's absurd.

So here's the article with associated references from whence I culled this little exercise. That's Sally Fallon and Mary Enig: It's the Beef. This is an excellent source for all manner of mythbusting with regard to meat and other animal products. Here's another good one.

There was another question posed on my original post speculating that perhaps there weren't heart attacks in 1910 because people didn't live long enough to have them. Average longevity was way lower. The firs thing to note about that is infant and child mortality is what brings the averages way down. There are still people living to 80, 90, 100 and beyond — plenty of them — and they weren't dying of heart attacks. Stephan had a good post last July concerning this exact issue, vis-a-vis the Inuit.

“Opposing Views” Asks…

October 27, 2008 Leave a Comment

Are Vegetarians Healthier?

Could veggie burgers increase your lifespan? Many experts insist that switching to a vegetarian lifestyle can greatly increase overall health, leading some to ditch their pork rinds like an old smoking habit. Still others swear by an omnivorous diet, saying that occasional New York steak never hurt anyone. Is a fresh helping of tofu just what the doctor ordered, or only a lot of empty calories?

You do notice the smuggled premise, right? Not to mention the typical smug assurance which, is really the more necessary the more wrong you are.

At any rate, the Weston Price Foundation does a very admirable and thorough job. Much of the veggie stuff is shallow assertion. The comments are generally shill with far too much protestation; but then again, that's what has to happen when you go up against reality in such a stark manner. Thanks to Diana for emailing that link.

Here's one of my recent — and infrequent — posts on vegetarianism.

A Mental Exercise

October 26, 2008 4 Comments

I was going to try to design a poll, but let's just get on with it. Do your own personal poll; discipline yourself to create an actual list of probable causality, in oder of most likely to least likely. If you think the causation is likely multiple factors, then place two or more categories next to each other, like 1, 2, 3. In other words: in order of priority, of likely cause.

The most certain vector for approximating the level of heart disease is a data point relatively easy to obtain: death from myocardial infarction ("heart attack"). It's well established that heart attacks are typically caused in first-order by heart disease (generally used to describe a number of related conditions). Naturally, everyone is thusly focussed on second-order causes: what causes heart disease?

Let's take in some statistical data. Myocardial infarction was almost non-existent in 1910 (heart attacks were unheard of). By 1930, deaths from MI had escalated to 3,000 per year. That would constitute a thousands of percentage increase, approaching infinite, the lower the actual number of deaths in 1910. It began to taper off in terms of percentage increase, so that by 1960, there were 500,000 deaths from MI per year. That's very important to understand, as health authorities proclaim that their low-fat diet prescriptions are lowering the rate of death from heart disease.

Now, here's the changes in consumption of various food groupings from 1910 to some point in the recent past, like a few years ago.

Food category A: 100% increase
Food category B: Moderate decline
Food category C: 100% increase
Food category D: 50% decrease
Food category E: 70% decrease
Food category F: 437% increase
Food category G: 280% increase
Food category H: 46% increase

Now, in what order would you assign most likely cause, A – H? I'll give you the actual food groups in a post tomorrow, as well as references.

Alexander’s Steakhouse

October 26, 2008 1 Comment

Three hours and counting…

Do yourself a favor: click on the link, then click the "Food" link in the header, then click on each of the photos in the left sidebar. I can't believe this restaurant has never been on my radar. That's about to change.

Have you gone over there yet? What are you waiting for?

OK, now are you going?

Yummy Cauliflower Dish

October 26, 2008 3 Comments

This is a derivative of a dish my mom makes sometimes. Pretty simple. It's a head of cauliflower steamed, then breadcrumbs browned in butter pored over.

Instead, I chopped up the head and quick fried it in the wok in coconut oil. In a saucepan, I melted ghee (a couple tbsp) on low heat and added 2-3 heaping tbsp of almond flour (almonds ground to the consistency of flour or meal). Even on the low heat they browned to a nice dark pretty quickly. That's a whole head and a third, and Bea & I finished off all but 3 pieces, along with grilled jajapenio burgers from Whole Foods (amazing — try them).

Speaking of Whole Foods, here was my shopping run the other day. Notice the lack of processed foods, sodas, and junk in general. Do notice things like fresh sauerkraut (to go with the pork spareribs in the large brown package). The "beef" in the clear package is actually buffalo, with which I made a Thai mussman curry Friday evening to the astonished delight of Bea and a couple of friends.

Dr. Barry Groves

October 24, 2008 4 Comments

He and his wife, eating a high fat, low-carb diet since 1962. See how he looks, now, at 72.

Despite following this shockingly high-fat diet for more than 40 years, Barry now weighs 6lb less than he did on his wedding day in 1957 when he tipped the scales at 11st 7lb.

He and Monica break every single diet diktat that has been trumpeted as “healthy eating”. And yet, here they are, trim, fit and full of beans, albeit metaphorical ones. How on earth do they do it? And where are the rest of us – eating piles of fruit and veg, and steering clear of cholesterol-laden butter – going wrong? After all, we’ve never been subject to so much education on good dietary practice, and yet prey to so many illnesses, ranging from diabetes to heart disease.

“Most people are eating in a way that is unnatural to us as a species,” says Barry, who holds a doctorate in nutritional science and has just written a book called Trick and Treat: How Healthy Eating Is Making Us Ill. “We’re a carnivorous species – our gut is identical to that of a big cat. Yet we’re encouraged to eat foods that have been padded out with modified starch and vegetable oils, and complex carbohydrates such as bread, pasta and rice, which have all been labelled healthy – but not the fatty meat that our body actually recognises.”

jimmy moore has a two-part podcast interview with Barry Groves.

Part I

Part II

Jimmy does a lot of work getting some really good interviews. You can subscribe to his podcasts at iTunes, and even access the vast array of past interviews. I like to listen to them in the car on long drives.

D

October 24, 2008 Leave a Comment

Everybody's on about Vitamin D, now. I've written about it a number of times, including just last week. Now here's a must-read from Stephan the biologist.

Vitamin D was originally identified as necessary for proper mineral absorption and metabolism. Deficiency causes rickets, which results in the demineralization and weakening of bones and teeth. A modest intake of vitamin D is enough to prevent rickets. However, there is a mountain of data accumulating that shows that even a mild form of deficiency is problematic. Low vitamin D levels associate with nearly every common non-communicable disorder, including obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, autoimmune disease, osteoporosis and cancer. Clinical trials using vitamin D supplements have shown beneficial and sometimes striking effects on cancer, hypertension, type 1 diabetes, bone fracture and athletic performance. Vitamin D is a fundamental building block of health.

[…]

Here's how to become vitamin D deficient: stay inside all day, wear sunscreen anytime you go out, and eat a low-fat diet. Make sure to avoid animal fats in particular. Rickets, once thought of as an antique disease, is making a comeback in developed countries despite fortification of milk (note- it doesn't need to be fortified with fat-soluble vitamins if you don't skim the fat off in the first place!). The resurgence of rickets is not surprising considering our current lifestyle and diet trends. In a recent study, 40% of infants and toddlers in Boston were vitamin D deficient using 30 ng/mL as the cutoff point. 7.5% of the total had rickets and 32.5% showed demineralization of bone tissue! Part of the problem is that mothers' milk is a poor source of vitamin D when the mother herself is deficient. Bring the mothers' vitamin D level up, and breast milk becomes an excellent source.

Stephan provided links to sources for a lot of the studies showing the relationships he notes. You can get those references on his blog.

Mark Sisson also has a post up about the sunshine vitamin.

Admin Note

October 23, 2008 3 Comments

Sorry for the must & dust around here last few days. I have reader questions in email to get to, some reader food pics, and oodles of other stuff.

Have been very busy with another project, but I'm beginning to get a handle and so should be able to channel more energy to the blog very soon.

Thanks for the support and for the patience.