Matt Stone again on diabetic control
 

http://180degreehealth.blogspot.com...s-sunshine.html

I'm very interested to see where his experiment leads.

Yeah, I'm following him too. :)

Patrick

Why is it surprising that people on high carb diets can have lower fasting BG than someone who's adapted to low-carb? Hypoglycemia is a sign of incipient diabetes.

I'd be a lot more interested in comparing insulin levels, triglycerides and stability of both BG and insulin. A few points of glucose within normal range doesn't seem much to hang a judgement on.

Honestly, since he is merely reading other people and has zero medical qualifications I don't think he should be putting out books on anything related to diabetes.

This is a good point. GCBC has a section where he talks about how the diabetic community got all excited about studies that show good blood sugar control with high carbs - it can be done, but at the cost of excessive high insulin all day long for some people.

If you can keep total energy in line, no fat gain. But you have to toe the line with sat fat (pure energy) and excess carb for your activity. If you have too much fat or carb, fat gain.

But because there is no way to measure the insulin damage easily, it is not measured.

See what Peter from Hyperlipid says about higher BG readings in low carbers and how they mean something different than from diabetics.

http://high-fat-nutrition.blogspot....resistance.html



It's a bit technical (understatement!) but this here is key:

So, we're insulin resistant because we have so little glucose in our blood and very little insulin too. As soon as we break our fast, then those numbers will drop lower a couple hours later. So a highish FBG for a low carber means, they're just a low carber who hasn't had breakfast yet.

A SAD eater, pre-diabetic, will have high blood glucose AND high insulin. His muscles and liver are permanently insulin resistant, not temporarily like a LCer.

So if you're LC, rely on an A1C test, not necessarily a FBG test.

Let me see if I understand correctly.

Two undiabetic people are going to follow opposing diabetic diets for two weeks and measure their blood sugar every morning while doing it.

I wonder what it is they hope to learn? :D

http://180degreehealth.blogspot.com...of-sunny-d.html

Humm I'd like to know how this works exactly. :o

Patrick

I fail to see where any conclusions, inferences, possibilities, or hypotheses whatsoever could come from the experiment.

I think maybe his eating is frying his brain.

What makes him qualified to go on about medical opinions?

The man is READING OTHER PEOPLE and from this, deciding he is an expert.

I understand he is young, and that is part of his charm, but arrogance+immaturity when it comes to serious medical issues is not a small thing.

It's one thing and bad enough to really just be a loud wannabe when it comes to weight loss. It's completely inappropriate to be getting directly into areas of life-threatening disease. Like he has any clue, like he has any way of getting any clue. He can just read other people and have an opinion. Better to point people at whomever he is reading in his weekly change of mind, frankly, since he personally has no qualifications for talking about treatment of disease.

PJ

Yeah, it doesn't. Sometimes I think Matt Stone is not too smart and doesn't quite understand all he reads.

As Peter at Hyperlipid wrote recently

Taken like this, high carb looks better, doesn't it? Until we learn that the blood glucose measurement is done two hours after eating. If it was done immediately after eating, or even during the meal, not only would the numbers be reversed, it would look really bad for high carb.

When eating zero carb, or very little carb, blood glucose barely rises immediately after the meal. This is due to insulin's action on blood glucose combined with the lack of incoming carbohydrate, which in turn fails to make blood glucose rises. If anything, eating zero carb will cause blood glucose to drop during and after a meal. Some time after that, oh let's say two hours, hormones will kick in and slowly return blood glucose to normal range. That's quite different from what a high carb meal does, isn't it? We eat carbs, blood glucose rises above normal, insulin kicks in, and blood glucose slowly drops back down to normal range. But all this time before it happens, blood glucose was artificially (i.e. from the meal and not the body itself) maintained above normal range.

Two-hour-post-meal measurement is about as reliable as looking at somebody from ten feet away. It only gives us a glimpse of what's really going on. It doesn't tell us, for instance, how much and how long blood glucose stays above normal over the entire day. In other words, it doesn't tell us how big the area is under the curve.

There is a way to measure this curve. Test blood glucose as often as possible once the meal starts until two hours post meal. But that would be too simple. It would teach us too much about blood glucose.

The quote from Peter of HyperLipid is very interesting. Particularly the part about IGF increasing risk of cancer.

But because I have an inquiring mind, I have to ask myself...if carbs = insulin = IGF = increased cell division = cancer....then why the heck do 7th Day Adventists on their HIGH carb diets have such LOW cancer rates?

No matter how "logical" an argument may sound, I simply cannot ignore common-sense observations like that.

Well said Jeff. Observations cannot be ignored. All observations must be explained by an hypothesis, otherwise said hypothesis is invalid and not even worthy of being tested.

Patrick

I have some insight here, having been raised a Seventh-day Adventist. For generations, the SDA church promoted ABSOLUTE avoidance of all alcohol, tobacco, and caffeine. The avoidance of caffeine extended to a ban on chocolate and colas. I think this really accounts for much of their longevity.
For years they also promoted absolute avoidance of pork and shellfish, but only recommended vegetarianism and never promoted veganism. A Seventh-day Adventist might eat beef, chicken, and finfish, and still be a member in good standing, but an SDA who began to drink coffee or alcohol or eat pork was considered apostate. No burnings at the stake, mind you :lol:, but you would find yourself on a prayer list if anyone found out. And, you could be expelled from an Adventist college if you were found to be drinking or smoking.

Here is a study that looked at coffee with SDAs:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/...11/ai_12673616/

Valtor - You posted a link to a video of Gary Taubes somewhere...he was talking about how fructose may be the issue, rather than carbs? Could you post that link again?

Strange, really... Quite a few of the people on this forum came here after having tested all that low-fat, vegan, high-carb stuff, found it didn't work, in whatever way, and turned to the low-carb way of eating. Seems that Matt Stone is just doing it the other way round...

I tried the Joel Fuhrman way of eating, too, once upon a time. I did lose weight, too, but basically because I was absolutely starving the whole time (I thought this was a good thing, so I did it happily). I lost muscle in the process, too, and I will never ever go back to that way of eating.

I wonder if Matt Stone will also monitor his body composition as he follows this diet??? I wonder if he will suffer from the same loss of muscle as I did???

The difference between me and Matt, though, is I never decided to open a big-mouth blog and proclaim myself an expert on anything, let alone start giving advice to diabetics. The guy needs to put his ego on a serious weight-loss diet, that's for sure!!!

I can't believe that this guy is for real.

amanda

There you go: http://www.dhslides.org/mgr/mgr060509f/f.htm

Slide 48.

Patrick

Thanks Valtor. Interesting that Taubes himself appears to be confirming the theory that fructose is the majority of the problem.

Makes me cringe when I think of the absolutely obscene amount of fruit I used to eat on Cordain's version of paleo diet. When he said "eat all the fruit you want", that was all the excuse I needed to gorge on the stuff.

Watched the video/slide presentation by Taubes. It's very compelling stuff, and Gary is certainly sticking by his guns.

But if I were in that audience, I'd be asking why - if carbs drive insulin, drive fat - are Asians not generally fat. Why are Peruvians who eat BIG ole starchy potatoes not fat. Why are many vegans so slender on very high carb intake?

His arguments appear "bullet proof" but too many real world populations which eat plenty of carbs appear to totally refute his main thesis.

Michael Eades has posted Gary Taubes’s answers to questions sent in by readers. The first one, “How do Asians and others living a seemingly high-carb existence manage to escape the consequences?” Taubes’s answer:

There are several variables we have to consider with any diet/health interaction. Not just the fat content and carb content, but the refinement of the carbs, the fructose content (in HFCS and sucrose primarily) and how long they’ve had to adapt to the refined carbs and sugars in the diet. In the case of Japan, for instance, the bulk of the population consumed brown rice rather than white until only recently, say the last 50 years. White rice is labor intensive and if you’re poor, you’re eating the unrefined rice, at least until machine refining became widely available. The more important issue, though, is the fructose. China, Japan, Korea, until very recently consumed exceedingly little sugar (sucrose). In the 1960s, when Keys was doing the Seven Countries Study and blaming the absence of heart disease in the Japanese on low-fat diets, their sugar consumption, on average, was around 40 pounds a year, or what the Americans and British were eating a century earlier. In the China Study, which is often evoked as refutation of the carb/insulin hypothesis, the Chinese ate virtually no sugar. In fact, sugar consumption wasn’t even measured in the study because it was so low. The full report of the study runs to 800 pages and there are only a couple of mentions of sugar. If I remember correctly (I don’t have my files with me at the moment) it was a few pounds per year. The point is that when researchers look at traditional populations eating their traditional diets — whether in rural China, Japan, the Kitava study in the South Pacific, Africa, etc — and find relatively low levels of heart disease, obesity and diabetes compared to urban/westernized societies, they’re inevitably looking at populations that eat relatively little or no refined carbs and sugar compared to populations that eat a lot. Some of these traditional populations ate high-fat diets (the Inuit, plains Indians, pastoralists like the Masai, the Tokelauans); some ate relatively low-fat diets (agriculturalists like the Hunza, the Japanese, etc.), but the common denominator was the relative absence of sugar and/or refined carbs. So the simplest possible hypothesis to explain the health of these populations is that they don’t eat these particularly poor quality carbohydrates, not that they did or did not eat high fat diets. Now the fact that some of these populations do have relatively high carb diets suggests that it’s the sugar that is the fundamental problem.

In GCBC when Taubes was talking about the china study he pointed out (this is a VERY fuzzy recall here) that it was the addition of grains that were not rice, in some areas, that seemed to be the factor correlated with health issues. This seems to be the same for what I read about other cultures and their carbs. E.g. lots of rice = ok; lots of fat = ok; lots of root veggies (in other cultures, and I mean 'sweet potatoes' NOT beets/potatoes) ok; 'some' foods as grains like fermented millet porridge etc. ok; but add wheat and it collapses even when there wasn't a lot of sugar, and this might be because it often is more 'sugar' to the body than sugar itself I suppose. He did not dwell on this, it is just something I took away from it, so maybe someone else can quote a more specific/accurate part (I don't have the book here).

It does seem more and more as if bad oils, fructose, and wheat, are at the heart of all of this.

The real question is what fixes it. You can eat good oils, take supplements to try and balance the bad oils you're trapped in like store bought meat, avoid fructose in every form except the rare berry, and ban all grains and even gluten. How long does it take for that to fix something? Does it fix something? In how many? Are there other factors that matter to 'healing'? If it's done metabolic damage already does that mean that every major gland and organ and hormone actually has problems, as well as stomach digestion, small intestine absorption, etc.? Is the complexity of this in part because the damage is pervasive body-wide and not just limited to a few key transactions like storing fat? These are the things I wish someone knew.

I understand what you mean PT, I decided I was fed up with my metabolism and I'm going to fix it for real. If not eating carbs is only a patch, then I'm going to find my real issues. I actually ordered some Metformin and Cytomel. My temp at 96.5 is not normal, whatever doctors tells me. I am now entering a more dangerous territory with this sort of experimentation. But self medicating might be the only thing that fixes me for real.

So I will try the WT3 Protocol (Wilson's Temperature Syndrome T3 Protocol). It's supposed to be done with timed-release T3, but all I have access to is Cytomel.

I'm really sick of trying to fix the problem by treating the symptoms. I want my properly functioning metabolism back and I'm going to fight for it ! :)

Patrick

Regarding improperly functioning metabolism. Yes, hormones are important in that regard. But so is muscle. Do you weight train?

I did, but only 5 hours a week of intensive supersets and dropsets for about 6 months. I did get bigger muscles, but that did not change anything for my temperature. I lost 5 pounds on the scale, so less fat and more heavier muscles. It was about 15 pounds fat loss and this was combined with low-carbing.

It never became natural for me to do this, which means it is not what my metabolism needed to function properly. I need a good endo, but this is a ridiculous thought where I live. So I'm taking things in my own hands. I will fix myself no matter what it takes.

Patrick

Hmm...self medicating with any hormone seems mighty risky unless you are VERY educated about proper doses. For instance, the amount of estrogen a woman secretes over a 30 year period weighs about as much as one postage stamp.

Dem hormones sho is powerful stuff!

Indeed, I've been reading on this for the past 3 years and it is just now that I really feel confident about it. I feel like I could become an MD if I only had the prior grades to be accepted (I was too lazy in school). ;)

Patrick

Valtor - 37 degrees centigrade was, IIRC, determined by the French. It was NOT intended to designate temperature to the tenth of a degree - body temperatures naturally vary. The US equaivalent of 98.6 is scientifically a mis-statement as normal temperature. It mistakenly implies that normal can be determined to a tenth of a degree. Other information regarding body temperature:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_temperature