Sugar Nation

How would you like to read a book that upends a lot of today’s standard advice about diabetes and prediabetes? Not another one! Well, here it is. Jeff O’Connell has written a book for American sugar eaters of today. He is a fitness writer and bodybuilder who tells about sugar and prediabetes and their impact on his life. The subtitle of the book Sugar Nation gets to the core of his memoir: The Hidden Truth Behind America’s Deadliest Habit and the Simple way to Beat it.

O’Connell tells his story about discovering that he has prediabetes. His father died of diabetes.  O’Connell didn’t just take medication or give up, but rather did research about this disease that showed him where many Americans eat the American diet, get minimal exercise and get sick. The culprit is the huge amount of sugars and carbohydrates that we are eating combined with sedentary lifestyles. He shows that diabetes brings with it complications including heart disease, kidney shutdown, nerve damage, and amputations.

He says that we have the tools at our disposal to prevent and reverse the disease, but many people aren’t using them. He says that many doctors know little about diet and nutrition and focus on treatment rather than prevention. He presents interviews with and data from many doctors who work with diabetics. He takes us into the lives of people with diabetes who follow the standard medical advice and see their disease advance. He sees his diabetic father suffering at the end of his life.

The tools are low carbohydrate diets and fats, and keeping physically fit. Diet and exercise. He weaves his own story through much of what he presents, which makes it readable and easy to understand. There was a lot that he says he didn’t know at the beginning of the story, particularly “I didn’t know that the best way to lose weight and keep it off is to do the exact opposite of what the majority of mainstream weight-loss experts recommend.” (p. 3.) He says also, “What I did know? That my limbs, heart, and kidneys were worth a hell of a lot more to me than hamburger buns, French fries, and glazed doughnuts. So I changed my ways with a vengeance.” (p. 3.)

O’Connell gives information about reactive hypoglycemia, a condition that happens to some people who are normal weight or thin but have prediabetes. He is one of them. He says there is not a lot of good data about it. But it occurs in a lot of diabetic patients.

A lot is packed into this book It’s worth reading.

O’Connell, Jeff, Sugar Nation: The Hidden Truth Behind America’s Deadliest Habit and the Simple Way to Beat it. 1^st ed., Hyperion Books, 2010.

The Big Fat Surprise – Book Review

Fat. Healthy or unhealthy? Saturated vs unsaturated, trans fat. Fat science, fat politics. Diets: low fat, Mediterranean, paleo, low carb.  Dean Ornish vs Robert Atkins. Gary Taubes. These are covered in The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet, by Nina Teicholz. I was fascinated as I read about how the book turns conventional dogma about fat upside down. Teicholz, a writer and apparently not a doctor or nutritionist, spent ten years on this book and gives us about a hundred pages of documentation, including notes and bibliography, for her assertions that the last sixty years’ advice on fats have been wrong.

To quote the author, “The more I probed, the greater was my realization that all our dietary recommendations about fat—the ingredient about which our health authorities have obsessed most during the pat sixty years—appeared to be not just slightly offtrack but completely wrong. Almost nothing that we commonly believe today about fats generally and saturated fat in particular appears, upon close examination, to be accurate. “(p. 2).

Teicholz points out that once the low fat, low cholesterol hypothesis was in place, it was very difficult to write or talk against it. She goes through the history of America’s advice and experiments about dietary fats. According to Teicholz, studies that contradicted accepted belief were often not given credibility or not published; researchers were unable to get funding for further studies. Even prominent experts in the field were not believed. Meanwhile, Americans found themselves with growing epidemics of chronic disease related to diet.

Much of the book examines the story of nutrition science regarding dietary fats as its advice went from bad to worse. In the 1950s medical experts looked for ways to reduce heart disease and came up with the idea that saturated fat, or primarily animal fat, caused heart disease. Ancel Keys developed what various writers have called the cholesterol hypothesis, which said that high cholesterol caused heart disease. From that came the low fat diet, and advice to replace fats with carbohydrates. Teicholz takes us from that to saturated fat to polyunsaturated fat conclusions, bolstered by President Eisenhower’s heart attack. Lots of science, both good and bad, appears here. Bad or flawed science comes from studies which were designed with a particular conclusion in mind, or studies with data points that support the hypotheses but not the ones that do not, and other flaws of design, participation or follow-up. Teicholz read and reported on a great many studies.

Sugar never got much study, according to this book. Teicholz suggests that studies have shown that sugar causes heart disease, not saturated fat. And so Americans went from the saturated fat veto to the low fat diet, to trans fats and manufactured fats to the Mediterranean diet to high fat low carb. At the end the Atkins diet wins after being scorned by doctors and nutrition people for many years. The Atkins diet is characterized by high fat meat and low carb vegetables. Teicholz reports the studies, large and small. She credits nationally known food journalist Gary Taubes with breaking through the accepted story because he is outside the system, not a doctor or nutritionist. She also says she was able to write the book for the same reason.

Food manufacturers are not vilified in this book, but the part they played in creating foods for these diets is told, as is the politics of food that gave us the food pyramid. The USDA continues to say stay the course and avoid saturated fats. Teicholz says that death from heart disease has declined but the actual occurrence of it has not appeared to decline, possibly because medical treatment has improved. She points out that Americans “have experienced skyrocketing epidemics obesity and diabetes.” (p. 327). She says that recent studies have showed the absence of negative effect of saturated fat on heart disease, obesity or diabetes. She concludes that “bias and habit present powerful, if not impenetrable, barriers to change.” (p. 326).

Teicholz does not address the effect of her conclusions on the environmental consequences of trying to feed animals to millions of people beyond saying that she recognizes it but environmental impact is not within the scope of her book. She also does not advocate for or against vegetarian diets but shows that they come up in studies of fats.

This book is one more addition to my library of ideas on how to eat well as a way to stay healthy. I read other well qualified writers and understand that not all agree with her dietary conclusions.

Medical Advice. Huh?

http://thyroid.about.com/b/
Good Housekeeping Magazine Owes it to Millions of Thyroid Patients to Get the Story Right

Wednesday July 27, 2011.

It appears that Good Housekeeping published a misleading article. Or did it? That's the problem with medical commentary these days. The experts don't always agree. Sometimes they rarely agree. I learned this firsthand in my life. I discovered that I couldn't always believe what I was reading or what a doctor told me.
 
The topic of the article cited above is hypothyroidism. There is disagreement among medical professionals about treatment and drugs for hypothyroidism and other medical conditions including cancer, heart disease prevention, diabetes and others.
 
Once upon a time I went to a doctor, who correctly told me that I had (and still have) hypothyroidism. She prescribed a drug, levothyroxine, to treat it. So far so good. At that time I still believed in advice from the conventional medical people.
 
Some years later, I was advised that my blood sugar was getting high, but not given advice. Later, I was told that my cholesterol was high, but not given advice. So far no advice, no drugs. Later still, a doctor strongly recommended that I take a drug to lower my cholesterol.  At that point I started to do research. Yikes and hoity toity, had I ever been fooled. I discovered that conventional doctors' opinions are not the only ones out there. I learned that eating the "healthy" American typical diet is an invitation to disease, especially diabetes. I learned that there is a large group of people who have written intelligently about the dangers of taking drugs to lower cholesterol, and that high cholesterol isn't the cause of heart disease in most cases. I learned that I might have better outcomes if I changed my thyroid medication to bio-identical. Then I discussed these things with my doctor. And my next doctor. And my next doctor. We weren't on the same planet.  Then I read about cancer treatment that didn't include chemotherapy. I'm glad I don't have cancer.
 
The article cited above points to (but doesn't actually say) the need for us to do our own research on conditions we are told we have. We also need to weed out the quackery if we can discover it, or embrace what a conventional doctor might call quackery. The citation above is from a website dedicated to information about thyroid conditions, operated by a woman who is not a doctor, and who did her own research. She has published books.
 
I'm not taking the drugs the doctors recommended, other than one for hypothyroidism. It took me about ten years and several doctors to finally locate a doctor who would go beyond what she had learned in medical school or from seminars presented by drug companies. I'm a lucky one.
 
I believe that people should be able to trust the medical advice they are given, and that that advice is likely to improve their health. (I am not optimistic about advice from doctors at this point.) I have several books about statin drugs that are very informative. After reading them and other information, I wouldn't touch a statin drug. I have several books on diabetes, which interest me because I have been trying for several years with success to keep my blood sugar under control without drugs. It amazes me that there are plenty of contradictory books about diabetes, some suggesting low to no carb diets, others recommending low glycemic raw vegetable vegan diets, and one promoting a high carb diet. They all explain the science. Even Dr. Robert Atkins explained the science. The doctors laughted at him too.
 
I'm glad to get advice from doctors when emergencies come up. They're very good with emergencies. But let's treat chronic conditions with open minds.
 
 

Drugs That Harm

Wow! Want to get sicker than you already are? Just read this:
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2010/12/09/15-dangerous-drugs-big-pharma-shoves-down-our-throats.aspx

I am a fan of Dr. Joseph Mercola's online articles. Sometimes I think he goes on for too long and buries his main point halfway through. However...this one says it like it is. He published an article from AlterNet that lists drugs that are said to be questionable for health, and points out the side effects. I'm with him all the way.

Then in his comments he points out some other drugs to avoid. He pretty much wipes out a lot of conventional drug therapy recommendations. He says that lifestyle choices can wipe out the need for most of these drugs, particularly choices of diet and exercise. He vilifies high fructose corn syrup, which he associates with many negative health conditions.

Among other things, he has comments about type 2 diabetes. He says that in many cases curing the disease is within the person's own control. I have read another book that says that, called There is a Cure for Diabetes, by Dr. Gabriel Cousens. Cousens says that diabetes will go away if the person goes on a 100% raw food diet. Mercola recommends eating a lot of raw food. Other recommendations for better diet are also in the Mercola comments.

I don't know very many people who are willing to eat 100% raw food. Even I would miss the potato chips.