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Where has all the blogging gone?

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 19:57:44 +0100

It's gone to www.EndSugarAddiction.com, everyone!

http://endsugaraddiction.com/who-we-are/the-latest-from-our-blog/

See you there!

Joslin Diabetes Center, Why the Partial Advice?

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 21:13:21 +0100

Here's some newly published advice for Type 2 diabetics from the Joslin Diabetes Center, which is affiliated with Harvard.

"It may not be possible to avoid taking insulin, and that shouldn’t be your goal. Diabetes is a progressive disease. The longer you have it, the more likely your beta cells (insulin producing cells in the pancreas) will wear out and you will need to take insulin by injection. This can happen despite taking excellent care of yourself. It is the nature of the disease. Insulin isn’t a death sentence.; it is a savior. It will control your blood glucose to help prevent both acute complications (hyperglycemia) and long-term complications. And insulin injections are virtually painless."

(From Back to Basics of Diabetes: Are Insulin Shots Avoidable? Posted 1/9/12 at joslin.org)

Technically speaking, the advice is correct--insulin clearly can be a lifesaver, using insulin can slow the rate of damage to the pancreas, and diabetes can be a progressive disease. But isn't something missing from these supposed words of wisdom? Like, "If you cut sugar and starch from your diet, you may be able to reduce blood sugars to the point where insulin shots are no longer necessary. You may be able to restore normal blood sugars naturally." Shouldn't advice to dramatically lower blood sugars (albeit being careful to adjust meds) be the first line of defense against a Type 2 diagnosis? One that is simple, cheap, tied to the root of the problem, avoids medications, and potentially very effective?

I think the reason professionals shy away from giving such sage advice is they don't believe their clients could possibly stop eating sugar, starch, and other processed food that helped get them into trouble in the first place. But if we can insert the paradigm of sugar addiction recovery into conventional diabetes treatment, imagine the possibilities. We could help millions from lapsing into a lifetime of insulin shot dependency. And it would open up a a whole new world of good advice.

Want good nutrition advice? Avoid a dietitian

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 20:54:15 +0100

If you want to be fat and sick, here's a great idea: take the advice of the American Dietetic Association, the trade group that licenses dietitians across the country. The ADA is in part sponsored by the junk food and pharmaceutical industries and seems to bend over backwards to accommodate addictive processed grains and food within the scope of their recommendations.

Here are some examples of rather curious advice from the ADA website:

"If you want to maintain a healthy weight for the rest of your life, it's all about energy balance."

In other words, if you're a dietitian, you are asked to believe in the theory of calories-in, calories-out, that recipe for weight-loss success that has helped ... uh ... just about no one. But the food industry loves talking calories because (1) it places the blame for weight gain and diabetes on the consumer, and (2) processed food makers can always package junkie foods in different caloric packaging and call it "healthy," eg, "100 Calorie Packs."

"Make Smart Choices from Every Food Group"

The ADA says: "The best way to get what you need is to enjoy a wide variety of nutrient-rich foods that are packed with energy, protein, vitamins and minerals from all the MyPyramid food groups." Do you mean, that pyramid/plate thing sponsored by the US Dept of Agriculture designed to market and sell commodity crops like wheat, corn and soy? That stuff that's making America fat and diabetic? Yes, that pyramid/plate thing.

"The key is to moderate, not eliminate. Watching portion sizes is an easy way to cut back without cutting out. If you want to consume less sugar, limit your soft drink intake to one can a day and switch to sparkling water the rest of the time."

Perhaps the most bizarre thing about the ADA--and something I came across repeatedly as I researched my book, Farewell, Club Perma-Chub--is the ADA's steadfast refusal to recognize that wisdom of totally eliminating certain categories of "food" from the diet. "Moderation in all things," is their mantra -- a mantra that keeps the sick and addicted good folks of America going back to the sodas, snacks, pizzas, and chips for sure.

So, if I were to seek the advice of a dietitian (at least those who follow the party line -- I do realize there are many wise renegades), I believe I would hear something like this:

1. "Oh sure, go ahead and have some sugary food from time to time, everything in moderation. We don't advocate eliminating entire food groups." (Actually I did have a dietitian say something like this to me once.) Seeing as a good portion of our country is flat-out addicted to refined sugars, why doesn't the ADA also tout the option of abstinence? Would you tell an alcoholic that "a beer or two a day won't hurt"? Why does the ADA tell America that sugar is by and large benign? Hm.

2. "You should follow the USDA MyPlate and eat 6 servings of grain per day." That would put me on the highway to diabetes for sure.

3. "Exercise to burn off your excess calories." I guess the dietitians have not noticed their clients failing to maintain a healthy weight by exercising off their donuts and bagels. Weight loss is the byproduct of hormonal changed precipitated by elimination of sugar, grains and all that processed food made by the ADA's sponsors. Caloric balance is almost irrelevant.

For the truth about the American Dietetic Association, see reallyeatright.org, a campaign to end the ADA's collusion with the junk food industries. Do your body and wallet a favor, take nutrition advice from people who lack conflicts of interest and understand the fundamental importance of eating only real food. And to the ADA, just say, "Let them eat cake."

Fat Is Diet Food

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 19:03:04 +0100

Today I'm going to make my favorite diet food, a fatty, yummy chopped liver. Yes, fatty food like chopped liver can be diet food, and one of the key ingredients for reversing sugar addiction! Why? First, because it's packed full of nutrients (B12, Vit A, Folate, iron, to name a few), and second because it's so satiating, which is of course related to the first point. I think of chopped liver as God's gift to dieters. I eat a lot of it, served without bread but instead on cucumber or red peppers, or with a salad, and never gain and pound. As for cholesterol, my blood cholesterol is perfect in spite of my dietary cholesterol being on the high side. That's because our blood cholesterol levels are mainly determined by action of our liver, and not by what we ingest (really, look it up, I'm not kidding!).

Here's one way to prepare it:

1 lb. chicken livers (fresh, not previously frozen if you can find them)
2 cups finely chopped onions
2 hard-boiled eggs
6 tablespoons of schmaltz (chicken fat, but I'm using duck fat today)
salt and black pepper to taste, plus a dash of balsamic vinegar, to taste

Preheat broiler to 500°. Broil livers on broiler rack 4 inches from the heat source for 3 minutes on each side. Remove from the oven and finely chop livers.

Melt the schmaltz in skillet and sauté onions over medium/low heat until soft and just beginning to brown. Add chopped liver pieces and sauté 1 minute more. Remove from heat.

Pour contents of skillet into a mixing bowl. In a separate bowl, chop the eggs and add them to the liver mixture. Mix in the salt, pepper, and balsamic (if using). Mix everything together until well blended. Chill at least 3 hours in the refrigerator before serving.

Diet food never tasted so good. But make your fats healthy fats, and avoid all vegetable oils like corn, canola, and safflower oils. Bon Appetit!

Dr. Oz Is Giving Me a Heart Attack

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 19:23:17 +0100

If I really want some exercise, I avoid the gym and instead tune into The Dr. Oz Show, where I can be sure my blood will boil with minimal effort on my part.

Now, Dr. Oz seems like a decent man with a fairly benign yet lucrative mission to bring medical and health information to the masses, but who can't help but notice that his audience is fat and that years of the Dr. Oz Show, which presumably is delivering meaningful advice, has done nothing to return them to normal weight? (Apologies to the Dr. Oz Show and Critical MAS for using this image). If Dr. Oz's advice actually worked, few of his fans would remain obese or diabetic.

So, what's wrong with the standard Dr. Oz fare? He has an audience chock full of stark raving sugar addicts who have no clue they're stark raving sugar addicts. They think their problems are calories, exercise, too much fatty food, or lack of so-called superfoods or supplements. They think waffles, cookies, and pastas are normal human foods. In a recent show about cancer prevention, Dr. Oz did all he could possibly do to dance around the most critical message to Stop Eating Sugar and Starch, but instead focused on things like eating whole grains and exercising. Yes, he says to cut down on junk food, but just dabs his toe in this pool--he will not tell the truth about sugar addiction and the pivotal role it plays in hyperglycemia, hyperinsulinemia, and inflammation, three of the triggers behind cancer growth.

Why is this? Could it be that Dr. Oz's show is sponsored by all manner of processed food manufacturers? That as soon as he mentioned tumor growth, the show cuts to a commercial for Hershey's Kisses? Dr. Oz, so long as you play hide-the-culprit you'll always have a raft of wealthy advertisers and a sickened constituency seeking your help. Now that's what I call a perfect business plan, even if it is a sort of medical disaster.

Re-introducing Sugar: Not a Good Idea, But....

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 03:38:30 +0100

When I talk to people about cutting out sugar, the response is usually, "No way, I could never do that!" And while I'm a big proponent of sugar-free living, I do think a lot of us don't need 100% abstinence to remain at a healthy weight and keep hyperglycemia-related diseases at bay. Our addictions vary so much person to person.

With that in mind, over the past few months I have dabbled in bits of sugar here and there to see how much, if any, I could tolerate without reinvigorating that ol' Sugar Gremlin in my head. So far, I found I could eat a small (note: small!) amount from time to time without much consequence. Here are some examples:

--Meat cooked in a sweet marinade
--A bite of a rich gourmet dessert at a special party
--A half teaspoon of honey in some plain full-fat yogurt
--A spoonful of my son's froyo

Is this perfect? Certainly not. And I will no doubt return to a zero-sugar period soon enough. But I found my sugar sensitivity to be dose-dependent: a little bit as an occasional mini-treat has not so far reactivated the addiction Gremlin--due, I am sure, to the successful re-normalization of my biochemistry. However, CAUTION, I would not tempt fate with even little bites of sugar until you are completely off sugar for at least six months.

So, what's the point? If you think you couldn't possibly live without sugar, don't let that keep you from saying Farewell to Club Perma-Chub by going abstinent for about six months and then, in tiny controlled increments, re-introduce bites of those old favorites you thought you could never live without. You may find that a single bite of Chocolate Decadence, for example, may suffice whereas before you needed an entire piece. Or you may find you've lost your taste for sugar altogether. Or, sob, you may find your old sugar cravings return, in which case you know exactly what to do to get back on track. But no matter what, don't let the "I can't live without sugar" feeling keep you locked in Fat or Diabetic Jail for the rest of your life.

My Notes from a Lecture by Robert Lustig, MD November 16, 2011

Sat, 19 Nov 2011 23:11:55 +0100

Robert Lustig is the UCSF pediatric endocrinologist famed among other things for his widely viewed Youtube video, "Sugar, the Bitter Truth." He delivered a brief lecture as part of a Stanford's "Cafe Scientifique" series the other day and I attended, keen to hear his latest take on the role of sugar and hormones in the obesity and diabetes epidemics. Here's a quick overview of the points that most struck me.

• 20 million American kids are overweight. There are 366 million diabetics worldwide in 2011, which amounts to 5% of the world's population. Type 2 diabetes is "chewing through the world's healthcare dollars; we have to solve this," he says. We already pay a 50% premium for health care costs for obesity-related health problems.

• In the past 30 years there has been a six-fold increase in the prevalence of obesity. The root cause is a mismatch between our current food environment and our innate biochemistry (personal note: I was glad to hear this, since that was the main message of my book Farewell, Club Perma-Chub).

• For the most part, the obesity we see today is caused by the phenomenon of leptin resistance. Leptin, a hormone which normally signals the brain that the body has sufficient energy stores, stops working in the obese person.

• If you have low leptin, the brain thinks you are starving, no matter how much fat is on your body. "If we can fix leptin resistance there wouldn't be obesity," says Lustig. Low leptin feels like starvation--obesity is a manifestation of brain starvation. The starvation response causes "recidivism" in dieting, or the tendency to regain all the weight lost.

• It's the action of another hormone, insulin, that blocks what leptin is supposed to do. Elevated insulin blocks leptin signaling. Again, the brain thinks the body is starving and doesn't know it's actually fat.

• If we lower insulin, the body is no longer being told to store fat -- we have more energy to burn. When insulin is high, the blood glucose goes to fat. When insulin is low, blood glucose is at your service to burn as fuel (resulting in the urge to exert and exercise).

• To improve leptin sensitivity, drop your insulin. To drop insulin, reduce carb consumption.

• High sugar is a pain reliever and activates the opioid system.

• The more sugar in your system, the faster your tissues brown (just as with cooking), and the faster you die.

• Metabolic problems are found when consumption exceeds 200 calories of day of sugar. (American average is 22 teaspoons/day of added sugar, which is 350 cal)

• Sucrose is half glucose, half fructose. Fructose induces insulin resistance, which induces leptin resistance.

• All aspects of metabolic syndrome derive from fatty liver, which results from excessive alcohol or fructose consumption.

• Sugar is, by a humongous margin, the most potent variable explaining diabetes rates worldwide. (I'm omitting the actual number because Dr. Lustig says the data are still unpublished.)

• You can have a normal biomass but have a fatty liver driving metabolic syndrome. Body size is not the whole story.

• Leptin resistance is not a mere aberration, it had an evolutionary role, conferring selective advantage on the humans who could store the fat from gorging on summer/fall fruit to enable survival through a long food-free winter.

Thanks for coming down to Stanford, Dr. Lustig, and for shining a bright light on the role of hormones in our epidemics. It's not about calories-in/calories-out, people!

To Lose Weight, Manipulate Your Hormones and Don't Count Calories

Thu, 17 Nov 2011 16:11:07 +0100

The myth of "calories in-calories out" as the purported key to weight loss has been debunked by those in the know. Our digestive and metabolic systems are vastly more complex than a simple furnace burning fuel--our storage of fat arises from complex biochemical transactions and not from excess calories. In fact, high-calorie ketogenic (high fat) diets are well known in the medical community for resulting in weight loss. So much for the calorie theory of weight loss.

Indeed, in my own experience, as well as that of most everyone I interviewed for my book, Farewell, Club Perma-Chub, the supposedly scientific calorie-based approach failed to result in sustained shedding of pounds, and when it did work, the results were fleeting, with the weight gained back, and then some.

The real key to permanent weight loss, we now know, is eating such a way as to manipulate your hormones to promote fat burning. As Gary Taubes describes so eloquently in Why We Get Fat, it's the operation of insulin, that fat-storing hormone, that plays the dominant role in weight gain. So, reducing insulin -- by reducing carb intake -- is a hormonal key to weight loss. And we now know that sensitivity to leptin, the hormone the signals satiation, is also necessary for ongoing fat loss. Again, to increase leptin sensitivity, we must cut those carbs.

The other way to heighten your hormones' ability to signal for burning of fat stores is to sleep during an easygoing intermittent fast, every night. That is, sleep on a fairly empty stomach, going at least 12-13 hours between evening and morning meals. For example, eating dinner by 6.30pm and breakfast at 7.30am. This lowers your overall insulin activity and increases leptin sensitivity, all at once. We lose weight as we sleep, and not at the gym. So, sweet dreams, my friends, and now please have exhilarating and guilt-free workouts, without any thought of "No Pain, No Gain." Yahoo!

Sugar, the Narcotic

Sat, 19 Nov 2011 21:01:38 +0100

Around the world, sugar beets, sugar cane and corn kernels are being smashed, boiled, churned, evaporated and centrifuged to yield the concentrated extracts we know as sugar and high fructose corn syrup.

And we devour this stuff with abandon -- about 22 teaspoons of added sugars per person on an average day. And during the Halloween season, it’s worse: about 598 million pounds of candy is sold in America, nearly two pounds per person.

Given the obvious impact of this sugar glut on our national waistlines and soaring medical budgets, it seems reasonable to ask why do we continue, almost compulsively, to devour so much of the white stuff?

Let’s start by simply observing that sugar, though derived from plants, is not a food. The dictionary defines food as any nutritious substance we eat or drink to maintain life and growth. While some folks may argue sugar adds a halo of yumminess to certain actual foods, no one seriously believes cookies, cakes, ice cream, sodas, or candies are nourishing substances we eat to maintain life and growth. Growth of the belly and flabby bits, maybe, but not much beyond that. Indeed, sugar was not a significant ingredient in the human diet until a few hundred years ago, and it was viewed as a once-in-a-lifetime treat for all but the wealthy who could afford it.

Then, perhaps all this sugar is just empty calories, as we’ve been taught. No, no calorie is empty -- each bit of digestible stuff we put in our mouths will have some biochemical impact on our complex physiologies, and in the case of sugar those supposedly “empty calories” elevate our blood sugar, impact our gut biology and endocrine systems, and alter our neurochemistry. Indeed, sugar is well known for the mild euphoria it confers: the sugar buzz differs markedly from nourished feeling we get from eating unprocessed, ancestral foods. People describe it as a “a fix,” a “pick-me-up,” “warm, soothing feeling,” and “a little escape,” among others. Is this how we react to a food, or to drug?

And therein lies the rub. The reality is that for millions of Americans, far from being an occasional harmless indulgence, regular doses of that potent extract we call sugar act have trapped us in ruthless addictions: the stuff has so re-wired our brains and adulterated our natural biochemistries that we go into a harrowing withdrawal when we try to give it up.

For years sugar addiction has remained one of the best-kept secrets in medicine, but it’s time to take this skeleton out of the closet. That’s why many leading physicians, researchers, nutritionists, and obesity experts have come together in support of the first annual Sugar Addiction Awareness Day, October 30, to promote a fun but sugar-free Halloween and to raise awareness of the potentially dangerous, and addictive, effects of excessive sugar consumption, especially for young people.

Sugar addiction may be rampant, but it can also be overcome. Please learn more about our efforts at www.endsugaraddiction.com, and have a healthy, happy candy-free Halloween!

To Kick an Addiction, Think Maxwell Smart

Fri, 14 Oct 2011 18:03:47 +0100

Remember the opening of show Get Smart? To reach Control Headquarters, secret agent Maxwell Smart has to make his way through a series of doors, they go up, they slide sideways, they pinch his nose.... Well, what's the point? I think grappling with addiction can be like that.

The first door is something like, "Hm, maybe I have a problem." The next, "Gosh, I should do something about it." The next, "I'm not really an addict, I just like the stuff." And then, "Okay, I'll try this program." Then, "Wow, I don't think I can do this." And then, at last, the final door opens and you reach that place of such fierce determination there's no stopping you.

So, if you're stalled, feeling frustrated or fatalistic, or just not yet motivated, fear not. Make like Agent 86 and keep walking through those doors. Would you believe... you'll find your destination, eventually.