More Evidence that Refined Carbohydrates, not Fats, Threaten the Heart
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
What you want, and everyone wants, is fair, unbiased testing of any medicine, regardless of origin. Peer reviewed science and FDA approval tests are not perfect, but in the vast majority of cases they are better than "centuries of empirical evidence." The placebo effect is very real; if people are paying money, betting their lives, and putting potentially dangerous compounds into their bodies (whatever the origin), then we'd like better than that.
Also, I would add that alternative medicines tend to fail by not working at all, whereas (what we'll call) lab medicines tend to fail by having unforeseen, unexpected, longer-term side effects.
But seriously, as far as I'm aware (and I try to stay current on this topic), there is no 'medicine' out there with "centuries of empirical evidence" that isn't already accepted. There are loads of compounds that claim to be effective, but when tested they are found to be no better than placebo.
Even if a compound is found to be effective, it isn't enough to make a good medicine. The active ingredient needs to be identified, extracted, and stabilised in a product that allows doctors to safely control the dose that a patient receives. Skipping all of that work and just trying to take an uncontrolled substance is dangerous - you can't tell if the active compound has broken down, or just isn't present in a particular sample, or conversely, is present in dangerous amounts. Furthermore, the naturally occurring compound may have other, undesirable compounds included with it.
Modern medicine aims to control for all of this, and yes, the complexity can be off-putting compared to the simplicity of "natural" solutions, but there are good reasons for that complexity existing.
If people no longer die so much of the diseases of aging, it might cause some problems, but I think they would be small compared to the benefits (few things compared to 100-150k dying each day after getting frail and sick).
Basically, scientists told the politician, "We don't know what's causing it. Our advice is to eat less meat and dairy and less food overall."
The politician said, "I can't say that. I live in an agricultural state! I need something more specific to say... What's in meat and diary that MIGHT be to blame?"
And thus, fat and saturated fat were thrust into the mainstream as things to avoid despite there being little to no evidence to that point.
He went on a tour around the world, studying isolated groups of people, their diet (including mineral content) and checking their dental health, using it as a proxy for resistance to infection and proof that dietary needs are being met.
From studying groups as diverse as a remote Swiss village, windswept Scottish fishing town, African tribes, Pacific Islanders, and Inuit, he came to a series of conclusions which are at least somewhat in agreement with this.
A secondary point was also that poor nutrition of the mother, could be seen in children due to crowding of the tooth and other maladies.
http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200251h.html
The book is a little archaic and I am sure that some of the text sounds odd to modern-day ears, however if you can read past that you can find some interesting information.
I am aware of the skepticism some have about Weston Price, but recommend at least skimming his own words rather than reading only choice tidbits presented by those who disagree with him or would debunk his views as junk science.
Among their tenets:
* supporting raw whole milk instead of pasteurized milk
* believing that facial structure has an effect on health (and that the nutrition of one's parents affects this)
* campaigning against the fluoridation of public water
The book I mentioned does not talk about #1 and #3, but does mention his reasoning concerning #2 - that a lack of specific nutrients during pregnancy can lead to health problems, and that crowded teeth has nothing to do with genetics but instead has to do with nutrition.
If you read up on livestock nutrition, you will find that a lack of certain nutrients during gestation does lead to certain well-defined problems in the offspring; and for the next litter fixing the nutrition for the mother, stops the problem from recurring. I suppose a search for "pig gestation nutrition" will get you some links.
Personally I do question the need for fluoridation of water supply, given that other countries do not do it and their populations do not have significantly higher dental problems, i.e. lack of fluoridation is not correlated with higher rates of dental problems.
If Price's argument about nutrition is correct, fluoridation is treating the symptom rather than the cause in any case.
It makes me a little bit suspicious that it is such a bad read and such a huge collection of studies, because quelling the opposition with an immense amount of information seems more like a rhetorical approach than a scientific approach.
Also, on videos I saw Taube still is overweight. Not eating his own dog food?
1. Glycemic index / load...all starchy carbohydrates raise your blood sugar quickly and then cause a crash. This includes both white bleached flour as well as whole grains.
2. Gluten is the protein found in many grains, wheat being the most common. Gluten is responsible for SO many of today's problems. Seriously just google "gluten" paired with any autoimmune disease or other health condition and you will find loads of information. This is not just for people who are diagnosed Celiacs but for all.
3. Lectins are found in all grains and legumes. They are the defense mechanism for the plant to warn off predators to not eat them. They are toxic. When we consume them they are considered "anti-nutrients" and bind to various nutrients in our body such as calcium, magnesium, phosphorus, etc. The more you eat, the more your body is leached.
4. Calorie per nutrient, grains are horrible. It is impossible to calculate a grain based diet to meet all the recommended intakes while staying below the recommended calories. When you calculate a diet based on lean meats, fruits, vegetables, seeds, and nuts, it appears you are taking in a multivitamin.
5. Grains are acidic and the body is meant to run on an alkaline base. If you end the day leaning towards the acidic side you again start to leach nutrients, specifically calcium from your body. Replacing grains with fruits and vegetables gets you back to the alkaline side. The only acidic foods that should be consumed are grass-fed meats.
The Paleo approach is DEFINITELY the way to go for any person who is trying to get healthier and recover from chronic diseases your doctors have misdiagnosed you with. It is seriously amazing the vast number of misdiagnoses that occur when a holistic nutritional approach isn't considered.
http://www.imminst.org/forum/Acid-base-hypothesis-t40269.htm...
Also, I shall point out that oat is a glaring exception to the grain rule; it has NO gluten and lectin, it has a relatively mild impact on blood sugar and has a lot of fiber, with special mention of beta-glucan, an immunoprotectant, anti-cancer and blood sugar regulating fiber. However, make sure that it is plain rolled oats, steel-cut oats or oat bran; Cheerios is not a towering source of oat.
Tables 1 and 2 will give you a quick summary.
fructose is a sugar with a propensity for glycation
If you want to follow a low glycemic index diet, it's much more important to avoid potatoes, white bread, white flour and rice than HFCS
Just because they aren't as quick as HFCS doesn't mean they aren't bad for you. A bagel at breakfast has over 100 grams of refined carbs that become glucose in your blood within minutes of eating it. Tell me that isn't bad for you. Eat one every day and you might just get diabetes...
If I pull a potato out of my backyard garden, bake it, and then chow down, what part of that has been refined? There's as much fiber in a russet potato than there is in a half-cup of brown rice.
It might be that the cause of diabetes is glucose level spikes and therefore insulin spikes; the video that was posted here last month with the Robert Lustig from UCSF talking suggested it actually something other than insulin that contributed insulin-resistance -- free fatty acids precipitated by the liver. It's not as simple as saying this thing that has spikey behavior is going to become ignored by the body if it keeps spiking. Things that seem analogous aren't always, as much as it would make knowing good from bad so much easier to distinguish.
I won't tell you it's bad for you, but I'll tell you with a pretty damn high amount of certainty something else: both and I and you don't know it is bad for you.
Might there be a risk? Sure. But then we've spent the last thirty years believing something else, saturated fats, were more of a risk than they now appear to be. It might be possible that we are leaping too quickly from possibly correlative to sufficiently causal yet again.
There's a lot in common between the saturated fats craze of the preceding few decades, and the fervor of our new dietary crusades today. I'm not convinced that we've learned a damn thing from that experience, and thus worry we are destining ourselves to looking back on this craze the same way in 30 years. Biochemistry and metabolism just aren't that simple; making it artificially simple doesn't do crap.
Potato in particular is bad because it is a concentrated source of very high GI starch,
Are you sure about that? My experience is that if I haven't eaten enough and eat bread and then go running it doesn't help much, whereas if I eat sweets or something else with a lot of sugar it helps almost immediately.
My standard meal is eggs, sausage, and onions sauteed in butter and topped with salsa. Very cheap and fast (and good).
Link here: http://riskfactor.cancer.gov/DHQ/database/gi_values.csfii_94...
Discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1333106
I resolved to find glucose, and I eventually did. I had to go to one of the more industrial neighborhoods in Santiago (I live in Chile) to find it, and after a few trips there I had myself a 55 lb sack of dextrose mono-hydrate, which dissolves in water to form pure glucose.
Now I mix it with water for 250 calories of food for thought per glass or put it in half-liter plastic bottles to drink at school. It's amazing stuff, it's 100% healthy, and it's great for working at hard problems.
On the plus side, you'll be really sensitive to insulin when you do get some carbs into your system again :) And hey, I just read an article that said lowering insulin levels is the key to the longevity gains resulting from caloric restriction.
Reducing your caloric intake won't kill you and it has been shown in rats that it might even be good for you. Your liver only stores glucose, it doesn't create it (That would violate conservation of energy!).
This thread is talking about artifically spiking your blood suger which will rape your pancreas and eventually lead to diabetes. I wouldn't do it if I were you, but I might consider eating more vegetables and low calorie foods :-)
There is absolutely no reason to believe that your pure glucose is "100% healthy." If anything, glucose is less sweet than fructose, so fructose may compel higher food intake. But if you can religiously dole out 250 kcal of glucose, doing the same with 250kcal of fructose would be nearly biochemically equivalent.
The video explains why fructose drives you to eat more (namely, it doesn't fulfill the hormonal role that glucose does). It also states that fructose is more likely to form advanced glycation endproducts, but this is far less important than the hormonal differences.
So from all practical viewpoints, I agree with you. Fructose is way worse! From the most limited perspective (basically, lock someone up and feed them 250kcal of glucose vs 250kcal fructose and don't let them have additional food), they will be very similar.
I'd also like to point out I'm not drinking a shitload of this stuff all at once. The reason I avoid this is to avoid an insulin spike, which would, without question, defeat the purpose of using dextrose.
Glucose gets broken down into pyruvate via glycolysis, which is by far the primary way in which you generate pyruvate. This process generates a bit of energy, but the vast majority of ATP is generated during the Krebs cycle, which is where glucose metabolites (namely, pyruvate) get oxidized into CO2 and H20.
To respond more directly to your point: if 80% of glucose is immediately metabolized to CO2 and H20 (I don't recall but I'll take your word), that means that 80% of glucose enters the body, undergoes glycolysis, and then enters the TCA cycle. This means that 80% of the glucose in your body is quickly converted into fructose (yes, F6P). You could easily make this into a pure fructose molecule with a phosphatase (though this doesn't happen in vivo). The upside is that phosphorylated sugars cannot be transported by facilitated diffusion, so F6P will remain intracellular.
You'd better be hoping science comes through with cheap organ replacement/re-growth therapies soon and that you are rich enough to afford them. In the meantime, you could try common-sense or even some education.
In any case, a lot of formed and powedered candies are almost pure 'dextrose' -- so you don't need to go to industrial suppliers. Just grab some Sweetarts/Lik-M-Aid/PixieStix. (No corn syrup is listed on the ingredients of these, but sometimes 'maltose' is. It's two joined glucose molecules, but I don't know if it splits cleanly to that and only that in the body.)
basically, all three writers/experts agree that a vegetarian diet consisting of unprocessed foods is the best (although not foolproof) way to ensure that you will lead a long and disease free life.
the modern food revolution is only about 60 odd years old at this point - human evolution cannot keep up with how quickly our food has changed and how quickly our caloric intake has increased. perhaps in 10,000 years we will be able to find a way to absorb nutrients from krispy kreme donuts and pizza but for now its best to stick low on the food chain and as michael pollan say - "Eat Food, Not Too Much, Mostly Plants".
Anyone looking for sources or more info i recommend the following:
The China Study - T Colin Campbell The Food Revolution (Or Diet For a New America) - Tim Robbins The Omnivore Dilemma (Michael Pollan) Healthy At 100 - Tim Robbins
one last note - Diet for a new america was written in 1988!!! This information has been out there for decades - politics and misinformation has kept it relatively out of mainstream media and on the sidelines but the statistics and information is out there for those who take the time to look...
Robbins is a dietary extremist and his books make Quackwatch's list of non-recommended books that "promote misinformation, espouse unscientific theories, and/or contain unsubstantiated advice" [1]. The National Council Against Health Fraud even had a critical blurb towards his television program about Diet For a New America in their '91 newsletter [2].
While I find Campbell's actual research in the china studies important, the book infers much more than the studies showed, not to mention a lack of supporting follow-up studies that control for the most common criticisms (genetics, rates of exercise, comparisons with mostly meat-eating populations without diseases of civilization, etc.). I have a real issue with taking descriptive information from data and turning it into prescriptive advice before accumulating sound evidence. For a good critique, the always awesome SkepDoc Harriet Hall posted a review on the Science-Based Medicine blog (which I highly recommend) [3], although the comments get bogged down about her linking to a similar criticism by the Weston Price foundation.
Oddly enough, as a lifelong vegetarian myself, I find myself wanting to agree with these authors and recommending them to others. But it's disheartening these authors feel the need to fortify their ethical choices with shoddy scientific inferences. Yes, following their recommendations will almost certainly lead to better health, but only because those recommendations merely happen to correlate well with a healthier than average diet, not because their assumed causations about optimal health are necessarily correct.
However, I do agree with your recommendation for Pollan.
[1] http://www.quackwatch.org/04ConsumerEducation/nonrecbooks.ht...
Considering that this is the conclusion of the study, the article itself seems to soft-peddle the implications, stating in multiple places that saturated fat may be "less bad" than refined carbohydrates. I'm a little mystified as to why the article itself refuses to conclude that saturated fat is not a cause of heart disease. The evidence that it plays a role has never been particularly compelling.
The China Study makes some compelling arguments for avoiding "animal-based" foods, but of course, there are people like the Inuit, who don't exhibit high incidence of cancer and heart disease despite eating mostly animal-based foods.
I try to take all this stuff with a grain of salt, but the idea of "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." seems most sensible to me. And I'd probably add to that, "Get some exercise."
But I was just a kid and they were the grownups, so I didn't say anything and believed what they were telling me.
(Nothing, literally nothing, I learned in school outside of how to read, write, and perform simple arithmetic has been correct or useful in my life.)
Plus mixing high glycemic food with other food will flatten out the curve.
How refined is too refined exactly? Is whole wheat bread considered refined? Oatmeal? Granola?
Or are we specifically talking about white flour here?
Here's a link:
http://www.health.harvard.edu/newsweek/Glycemic_index_and_gl...
'carbocation posted a link to an Excel spreadsheet of GI listings for lots of foods, too.
You'll find that the lists aren't simply about demonizing Coca Cola and Wonder Bread.
This seems to be a good summary of what refined carbs are: http://lowcarbdiets.about.com/od/glossary/g/refinedcarbohdra...
Or, in short: All sugar including corn suryp, white grains (rice, wheat), starch, and grains in the form of flakes, puffs and so forth.
In this case, in addition to the other replies, I would point out that refined is not merely a synonym for "unnatural". The refining processes in question make the refined food much easier to digest, which causes the insulin spikes and (theoretically) the rest of the problems that arise when that happens chronically.
Personally I don't think it's impossible to mass-produce quality food, and there are other forms of "refinement" that can either raise the quality of the food, or bring out specific characteristics of the food without much loss, such as cold-pressing oils, so I don't think of refinement itself as a sort of dirty word or anything. Much, if not most, of the reason we don't seem to mass-produce quality food is that we haven't had a correct definition of "quality food" here in the US for literally 50 years.
It might be possible to suggest that it is not in the interest of large corporations to have it known that doing nothing with food is better for you than having them do things to it and then sell it on for a decent markup. If you were to believe that we live in societies where Governments treat corporate interest ahead of that of their general population of course.
That said, I tend to just saute or steam. Deep-fat frying is a lot of work for dubious reward.
The rest, yes, assuming you mean full-sugar/full-HFCS soda. (Diet sodas may be bad, but I find the theories behind that to be a bit more theoretical than the I-think-proved danger of the full-sugar sodas.) You'd think in some sense that "easier to digest" would be a good thing, but it really turns out not to be. And you'd be surprised what all has sugar and HFCS in it.
(I'm ambivalent about whether HFCS is worse for you than sugar or not; to be honest, the evidence for both is such that you really ought to almost entirely cut them out of your diet. As both meet that threshold, I consider arguing about which is worse to be mostly academic.)
With refined carbs (refined foods, actually) it should be seen as a spectrum, with less refined things (whole vegetables) being on on end and highly refined things (HFCS) on the other.
Just favoring less refined things over more refined things, without specific prohibitions of any particular ingredient can be a good place to start. Example:I've cut out HCFS soda altogether, but I still put a teaspoon of real sugar in my coffee.
Whole wheat, now matter how "unrefined" it is, is still an extremely crap food. You get a bit more minerals and proteins, but get more harmful phytates along with it. In general, it is like adding an ounce of quality wine to a barrel of sewage to beef it up, but the endproduct remains pretty much sewage.
"Refined" is not the word we're looking for, we're looking for specific compositions and chemicals that pose risks to our health. Much like the natural/unnatural dichotomy refinedness provides almost zero explaining power in regards to the normative question of what is good for you.
If a food is found in nature and humans evolved with it and like eating it, its more likely to be good for you if eaten with the sort of variety of foods you'd find in nature.
The fact that we like it is itself information about how healthy a food is, provided technology isn't fooling our brains somehow.
Nevertheless, this article is a great start; I like that the media is now starting to pick up on the correct correlation between carbs and atherosclerosis - and if they also begin to understand and convey the glycemic index, so much the better. As the studies discussed in this reasonably well-cited article indicate, carbohydrate load correlates with the atherogenic lipid profile, whereas saturated fat load does not.