Sugar and Fructose – The best post yet on the causes of the epidemic of chronic illness

We are close now to a strong agreement that the epidemic of chronic illness is diet related and that sugar and fructose is at the heart of it.

This chart showing sugar consumption is I think the smoking gun for looking at the role of sugar and now fructose in the epidemic of chronic illness.

This article – link here – is complete. It goes into depth on the process by which sugar and then fructose affects us and some people more than others. All who care about their health should read this. All who are in health care should too – for  we have to acknowledge that, until now, we must have been wrong. Our failure to make progress is the proof.

Here are the facts about the load:

Sugar consumption continued to increase in the 1900s, with an overall doubling in the United States and the United Kingdom between 1900 and 1967 (34). By 1993, >110 million tons of sugar were produced worldwide (33). Whereas sugar intake continues to be marked in the industrialized nations, it is in the developing countries that the greatest increase in the rates of sugar consumption has been observed (35 ). By the early 1970s, an additional sweetener, high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), was introduced in the United States, which had certain advantages over table sugar with relation to shelf life and cost. This sweetener, the composition of which is similar to that of sucrose, is used extensively to sweeten soft drinks, fruit punches, pastries, and processed foods. The combination of table sugar and HFCS has resulted in an additional 30% increase in overall sweetener intake over the past 40 y, mostly in soft drinks. Currently, consumption of these sweeteners is almost 150 lb (67.6 kg) per person per year (36), which has resulted in the ingestion of >500 kcal/d (37; Figure 1⇑).

Here they make the connection:

A sign that you are at risk from heart disease? You can’t see your willie!

Is this you? It was me. If it is you can’t see an old friend. But it is worse than that. Visceral fat is the most dangerous sign of impending heart disease. More on this site here

“A recent survey of 1,000 British men has shown that a third of men aged between 35 and 60 years, are unable to see their genitals due to a protruding midriff or, less politely, a beer belly.

As a result of the survey, funded by the medical group We Love Our Health, an online men’s health awareness initiative has been launched. The Big Check aims to encourage men to make a potentially lifesaving health check.

“Take off your clothes, stand upright and look down at your penis, if you can’t see it, you are obese,” says the group’s online doctor, Johan du Plessis.

“Don’t ignore it, it can knock years off your lifespan but it can also put you in serious risk from life threatening illness.”

All my visceral fat was gone in 6 months of a strict Paleo diet. I looked better. And my old friend works well again. No need for blue pills. It’s all connected.

“Erectile dysfunction does not just affect overweight men. The world’s largest study to examine links between erectile dysfunction and heart disease found even minor erection difficulties in healthy fit men, can be an indicator of future heart risks.

The authors of the study, undertaken in Australia and published last month in the on-line journal ‘PLOS Medicine‘, examined data of 95,038 men aged 45 years and older.

The researchers concluded that erectile dysfunction does not cause heart disease but may be an early indicator of the problems that lead to it, such as a build-up of plaque in the arteries.

So what to do? Explore the Paleo Diet

Had a heart attack? On a low fat diet? Why this is not a good idea

Make Believe? (From Grass Based Health)

Which Meat to Choose

Now you have decided to eat a more Paleo diet, you are confronted with the question of how to judge the meat you eat. Sebastien Noel has come up with an excellent guide here.

This article will explore several different types of meat: red meat (beef, lamb, goat, bison, etc.), poultry (chicken and turkey), pork, and seafood. These types of meat differ significantly in their nutrient quality, and especially in the quality of the fats they contain. Since fats are the foundation of Paleo nutrition, it’s important to know what fats are in your meat, so you can make educated decisions about what to eat and when to supplement with other fats, such as coconut oil. In general, grass-fed ruminant meats (beef, bison, and lamb) are nutritionally superior to poultry and pork, but this doesn’t mean you should never eat chicken again. Focusing mainly on seafood and ruminant meat as a staple source of calories, and eating moderate amounts of poultry and pork alongside plenty of healthy fats like butter of coconut oil will let you maximize both the variety and the healthfulness of your diet.

The entire article is here.

Taking Charge of your Health – Good Books – On Wheat and on Sugar

Getting back control of your health is more complex than simply changing your diet. But changing your diet is the best way to start. The new/old diet is also like a church with a spectrum of focus. Here then are two very helpful books that lie along this spectrum.

Wheat Belly by William Davis  - that looks at wheat

Fat Chance  by Robert Lustig –  that looks at sugar

It is important to take both out of your diet.

Humans are carnivores – get over it – and get well

Wise Traditions London 2010 – Barry Groves from Wise Traditions London on Vimeo.

An outstanding review. Everything you need to know about what we are meant to eat and why in half an hour.

Barry Groves shows how we adapted to a mainly meat diet – millions of years of ice age when there were few plants that we could have eaten – and the result. A large brain and a small gut.

Since the dawn of agriculture we have been shifting away from the food that we are best suited. Since 1980, and the advent of industrial food. we have made a dramatic shift away from fat and meat. And so have set up the epidemic that confronts us.

Paleo is not just another diet – It is about going home to being Humans again

Most new comers to “Paleo” think of it as just another fad diet. And we have had so many of them. And they ALL FAIL – so why would this be any different? It is different because it is not a diet but a call for us to heal ourselves from the damage that the industrial world has done to us. Food is a big part of this, but as readers of this blog know, there is so much more. Here Here Here Here

Here then is a call to all those who worry about diets and wonder if Paleo is for them:

Evolution doesn’t like this very much. That’s why we’re so sick in body and in mind these days. While most people seem pretty content to trade health and happiness with yummy tasting foods (or non-foods as I like to call them), a whole lot of others are questioning the validity of eating all their meals out of plastic containers only to wash it down with pills out of plastic bottles.

So, they head off to the Internet in search of answers. A Google search on a healthy diet yields the usual suspect:

1. the vegetarian diet. Change is always exciting but after a while of limiting meat and not seeing much of any benefit at all, they start to wonder (with a little nudge from rising awareness) if all the added breads, pastas, and other wheat products aren’t the culprit. Moving on, they decide to try out the diet everyone is talking about:

2. the gluten-free diet. They trade gluten grains for rice, beans, oatmeal, and the plethora of gluten-free alternatives. Their digestion is still a mess, they haven’t lost any weight, and the depression hasn’t lifted. Even if they were sensitive to gluten, they still feel terrible and assume gluten has nothing to do with it. So, back to the Internet now to narrow the problem down to red meat and saturated fat. With hopes of losing the weight they gained while scarfing down the almost, but not quite, tasty gluten-free snacks, it’s time to test out the tried and true:

3. low fat diet. Eating salads, chicken breast, and rice they drool over their friend’s plates and sneak little bites of forbidden foods. Week in week out they fail and miss their goals (because eating low fat is like abstaining from sex when a whole bunch of good looking, naked people prance around in front of you). They become more depressed and nervous and so they figure out a way to add some fun back in by:

4. counting calories. Finally at liberty to use ranch dressing instead of lemon juice, potato chips instead of saltines as they don’t exceed 1700 calories per day, they still aren’t getting jack for nutrition. They’re still depressed. They’ve lost a little weight but they’re not really cut like they so desire. Back to the Internets, they determine it was junk food slowing them down so they try the diet all their indie friends are into:

5. the raw vegan diet. This one actually tastes great and feels amazing too. They quickly pump themselves full of agave syrup and fruit sugar and feel great! Eventually, though, energy wanes. The cells start to dry out from the lack of saturated fats, the insulin plummets at shorter and shorter intervals, and muscles start consuming themselves from lack of protein. Emaciated, they amble back to the Internet craving meat and fat. Sitting at the desk with a bag of potato chips and other empty high-fat snacks, they enter search terms like “how much fat does a person need?” and “is saturated fat bad for you?” Finally they stumble upon the low carb diet and then finally:

6. the Primal eating strategy. They start eating as much as they want, when they want, and they’re eating all the fat they’ve restricted for the last 1 to 10 years. Within only a few weeks they’ve become tolerant again, hopeful, energetic, and stronger than ever. It seems this diet fuels itself with no extra effort required. Finally, satisfaction and results.

If you think about it, it’s kind of obvious that we shouldn’t be eating anything that you can’t pick or kill with a stick, but the world has replaced million year old tradition with lab-created/altered food variants. While these non-foods do manage to go in one hole and out the other without laying us flat in seconds, they are the cause of so many premature and miserable deaths. People are starting to realize it and it is because of this that:

We are we so fat in rural settings – part 3 – Because of our ancestry!

Prince Edward Island, where I live, has a very high obesity rate. So do many rural parts of America and of cource the rest of Atlantic Canada.

We have looked at why there is an physical environmental difference between cities and the rural and we have looked at the social environment where our friends influence how we look.

But why is the rate of obesity and related illness SO MUCH worse in certain types of rural settings? Now we are going to look at who we are as people.

The issue here is in our ancestral heritage. Those of us who live in rural Canada and the rural US tend to come from a heritage that is only recently exposed to agriculture.

PEI and Atlantic Canada are settled mainly by Scots Irish. So is the large Appalachian region of the US. It is mainly here in Canada and there in thje US that obesity and related poor health is the worst. Why?

The answer is that we are Gaels.

Gaels, are the Hunter Gatherers of Europe who got pushed to the edge of the continent by the new farmers.

Look at the thin sliver on the far left of Scotland and Ireland. That is the edge. We were pushed here like so many other Hunter Gatherers have been pushed to the edge where the land is marginal and not suitable for farming.

That is the edge – where the land is the poorest – where life is really tough and so are the people. It is where we come from and here is why this is important when we ask abut why so many of us are so fat today.

For the answer is this. We are the people in Europe with the least exposure to agricultural food. We are the least adapted. We are the most at risk of all Europeans to an adverse reaction to the agricultural diet.

For this diet is new when we look at evolutionary time lines. We have ALL come from a Hunter Gatherer past that extends back for millions of years.

We mainly ate meat, fish and plants. We never ate grains, dairy or beans. Imagine milking a wild auroch!

The maximum time that any human group has had to adapt to agriculture – what I call the “Modern Diet” would likely be 6,000 years ago. Here is new evidence on when agriculture began in England. In Evolutionary terms this is yesterday. Some Europeans have made a partial adaptation – but even this is lost by middle age.

The key point to bear in mind is that we are designed to be healthy and fit – PROVIDED – we live the plan that evolution has worked out with us.

As with all hunter gatherers, we did very well on our ancestral diet.

This engraving is of a Mi’Maq made in the 1800th century. This is what most adults would have looked like before they adopted our diet and way of life.

Here is a 60 year old Kitavan Chief who has never been exposed to our diet – see the similarity in body?Kitavans have no diseases of modern civilization.

Here is the late great singer Israel Kamakawi’ole just before his death. He is an example of the kind of reaction a recent hunter gatherer can have to the modern diet. He shares the same kind of Pacific hunter gatherer heritage to the Kitavan.

The closer you are to a hunter gatherer past – the more vulnerable you are to reacting badly to the modern diet. This recent exposure to the modern diet is a powerful force in why so many in the First Nations community have such a risk of Type 2 Diabetes and related illness and why the Gaels run them a close second.

So what to do?

So if you are of First Nations or Inuit heritage with maybe 150 years maximum exposure – the western diet of mainly grains, dairy and so sugar is toxic. It is also why alcohol is such a problem as is sugar – for they affect the brain in the same way. They are the same.

If you are a Gael – you are next on the list of at risk. Note the importance of sugar and alcohol in our way of life too. We are very attracted to it.

When I say Modern Diet – I mean bread/grains, dairy and legumes. The Industrial Diet is a separate category and is even more a disaster for us.

If we were to go back to eating a diet that was comprised of the traditional foods – mainly real meat and real fish and seasonal plants and fruit, we would be the ancestral groups most likely to “heal”. Even better, we stand a chance of doing what the Kitavan Chief has done. Plateau our aging in mid life.

Here is Dr Michael Rose on this great opportunity for us. Thesis 52

The irony is that while we are the most at risk – we have the best chance of reacting well to a shift back to the traditional diet.

Me 2 years ago – pre diabetic and a typical middle aged Gael on the modern diet.

It has taken me 6 months only to undergo a radical change for the better. For when I say “We” I am  Gael too from Ayr. I started to feel better after 3 months. I think in 5 years I will have got myself back to a metabolism of my heritage.

This then is a huge health opportunity. The First Nations and the Gaels are really suffering. Medicine has not arrested our decline. But by going home to who we are can heal us.

But there is a huge BUT. A BUT that I will deal with in my next post.

The BUT is this. We Gaels and First Nations’ Peoples have lost confidence in our culture and our tribes. We don’t fit into the Industrial World. WE think and others think that this makes us failures. We don’t want 9 – 5. We don’t want to make work the centre of who we are. We hate regimen. We hate offices – we want to be outside.

We were were never farmers and so never were serfs or slaves. We lived according to the time of nature not the clock. But of course farmers were ideally suited to becoming indistrial serfs – no change at all in how they lived.

We will explore this tommorrow. We will ask – “who is the greater fool?” – We will look at how the web and a new economy might enable us to bring back a hunter gatherer way of life in a modern context.

We will look at our tribal values and traditions – respect for our elders and for women – our love of music and the dance – our love of art – our love for our children – our deep respect for nature and sense of connection to it – our eternal view of time and see these as the values that all men and women need if our species is to survive what our industrial culture has done to us and the planet.

By Going Home we might give our kids a chance.

Grains are good for us? – Not for any mammal – So why are they recommended?

Worried about Cancer – This is the best resource I have seen to help you take charge

Dr Li’s research shows us a key aspect of cancer and the then fat – blood supply. That there are drugs now that work to reduce specific parts of the blood supply that feed cancer. No Blood Supply, Cancer cannot grow.

But then – much more interesting and in line with our philosophy here shows us that we can do better than treat better – we can Eat to Starve Cancer and by the wayt Obesity – for Fat too demands a blood supply. What foods work best?

The bottom line is that with the right diet you can reduce your chances enormously of ever getting cancer. And of course of getting and staying fat – that opens us up to Type 2 Diabetes and all the other Diseases of Modern Life.

Dr Li shows us what to eat that works best – Here Michael reminds us on the ONE thing you must not eat – Sugars in all their forms – for they feed the cancers and create the fat. … Continue Reading

The Food Pyramid Deconstructed

from Paleo Diet

Gluten and Celiac Disease

More and more people are sensitive to gluten and wheat. We have not changed in the last 50 years but the wheat we eat has. An excellent article at the WSJ here.

Modern wheat varieties have short stems, the result of RHt dwarfing genes that reduce the plant’s sensitivity to gibberellic acid, a plant hormone that lengthens cells. RHt genes were introduced to modern wheat varieties in the 1960s by Norman Borlaug from Norin 10 cultivars of wheat grown in Japan. Short stems are important because the application of high levels of chemical fertilizers would otherwise cause the stems to grow too high, resulting in lodging (collapse of the stems). Stem heights are also even, which is important for modern harvesting techniques.

If you wish to take control of your health, giving up grains is a key element. Many of us who come from heritages that have a long association with wheat have been able to tolerate it until middle age. BUT it now looks like even this period of tolerance is being reduced – for 90% of the wheat today is the novel variety from the 1960′s .

Better than going Gluten free – give up grains.

ADHD – Look at Diet!

Over 5 million children ages four to 17 have been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in the United States, and close to 3 million of those children take medication for their symptoms, according to the Centers for Disease Control. But a new study reported in The Lancet last month found that with a restricted diet alone, many children experienced a significant reduction in symptoms. The study’s lead author, Dr. Lidy Pelsser of the ADHD Research Center in the Netherlands, said in an interviewwith NPR, “The teachers thought it was so strange that the diet would change the behavior of the child as thoroughly as they saw it. It was a miracle, the teachers said.”

Dr. Pessler’s study is the first to conclusively say that diet is implicated in ADHD. In the NPR interview, Dr. Pessler did not mince words, “Food is the main cause of ADHD,” she said adding, “After the diet, they were just normal children with normal behavior. They were no longer more easily distracted, they were no more forgetful, there were no more temper-tantrums.” The study found that in 64 percent of children with ADHD, the symptoms were caused by food. “It’s a hypersensitivity reaction to food,” Pessler said.

This is good news for parents and children who would like to avoid many of the adverse side effects associated with common stimulant drugs, like Ritalin, used to treat ADHD — and bad news for the pharmaceutical industry. The National Institute of Mental Health reports that common side effects from the drugs are sleeplessness (for which a doctor might also prescribe sleeping pills), headaches, stomachaches, decreased appetite, and a long list of much more frightening (yet rarer) side effects, including feeling helpless, hopeless, or worthless, and new or worsening depression. But Pessler’s study indicates that up to two-thirds — or 2 of the 3 million children currently medicated for ADHD — may not need medication at all. “With all children, we should start with diet research,” Pessler said.

Your Ideal Diet – A great resource

Here is the best site I have found so far that talks in depth about the ideal diet and the science behind it all.

It opens like this -

This article is geared towards people who want to try out the Paleo diet and who just want to quickly know what they should and shouldn’t do.

No background science here or lengthy explanations, only 15 easy rules to follow to kick start your Paleo journey. It’s up to you to decide to what extend you want to follow those rules, but if you follow them 100% you can be assured that you are eating the best food for your body and greatly investing in your long term health and well-being.

 

Cooking Made Us Human

Many people imagine early man eating raw food. Have you tried eating raw steak? It’s hard. Have you tried eating raw tubers? Professor Richard Wrangham makes a strong evolutionary case for Cooking as a key shaping factor in our evolution.

You are designed to stay fit

This is Georgina Easter – she is 100 years old and here she is at her fitness class. She is unusual! But actually she is more “normal” than I had thought. We are designed to be like her and not like my mum.
… Continue Reading

How did we get here – A Food Crisis

Why did we stop hunting and gathering and what has our choice of a new food system mean to us – James Burke sums it all up in this brilliant segment from his series Connections.

It’s our nature to be healthy as we age