Hite: Misled, Misfed

http://womenmakenews.com/content/story/misled-and-misfed-bad-food-policies-mean-carbs-make-us-sick-and-fat

"Why are these grain- and cereal-based products a problem?  First of all, thanks to USDA subsidies and marketing, they are cheap, abundant, and widely-believed to be an important part of a healthy diet despite the fact that there is no biological need for them.  In addition, thanks to our industrialized food system, these products are conveniently available everywhere in hundreds of fun-filled varieties designed to appeal to our senses and our appetites. It is no coincidence that, thanks to human physiology, sugary and starchy foods have a number of addictive and fattening properties that protein, fat, and fiber foods do not. Not only do they create a "feed forward" mechanism in the central nervous system, they set up a hormonal environment in our bodies that encourages fat storage and prevents fat burning.  When we are unable to access our fat stores for energy, we have no choice but to get that energy by eating more.  The cheap, convenient, and highly-appealing carbohydrate foods that surround us set up a viscous cycle of hunger, fatigue, desire, and consumption, as our bodies store the calories we consume and send us back out for more.

"Misguided scientific theory, an agricultural policy created to promote quantity over quality, and a food industry happy to take advantage of human physiology have created a perfect storm of dysfunctional eating patterns within a food environment designed to perpetuate obesity and chronic disease.  Scientists eager to protect their government funding have established their careers attempting to prove that a diet low in fat and high in grains and cereals is the healthiest diet possible.  But human physiology trumps scientific agendas.  Thirty years of trying has failed to produce substantial evidence that a low-fat diet leads to healthy outcomes.  In fact, the science accumulated in the USDA's own Nutrition Evidence Library shows that in head-to-head comparisons, diets that limit sugars and starches produce increased weight loss and improved cardiovascular and diabetes risk factors compared to low-fat diets, even when those diets have the same calorie level.

"These results are especially significant for women, particularly minority women.  A diet high in processed carbohydrates can lead to poorly regulated glucose and insulin, factors in the mechanisms behind obesity, heart disease and diabetes.  Women tend to have higher baseline insulin levels and more glucose intolerance than men, conditions that can be exacerbated with pregnancy.   As a result, diets high in sugars and starches can be especially detrimental to a woman's health."  

Nice CF Write Up

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/11/01/AR2010110106050.html
"There's "weightlifting" and "weight lifting." The latter is just picking up heavy stuff, but the former is an internationally recognized sport that dominated the workout world in the early 20th century."
"
So why the shift away from a total-body technique that's pretty much guaranteed to make you run faster, jump higher and get stronger? "What works usually sells," Haff says. "But it's a lot of work."

To stage a comeback, weightlifting needed an army of advocates who not only didn't mind the challenge, but relished it. And it seems to have found that through CrossFit, a 15-year-old methodology for producing well-rounded athletes that's found huge success among law enforcement, the military and, these days, the general population."

Mercola/Rosedale Home Run

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2001/07/14/insulin-part-one.aspx

This article is a gold mine of health information, a model which aligns very closely with what Taubes presents in "Good Calories Bad Calories."  First excerpt:

"This patient saw me one afternoon and said that he had literally just signed himself out of the hospital "AMA," or against medical advice. Like in the movies, he had ripped out his IVs.

The next day he was scheduled to have his second by-pass surgery. He had been told that if he did not follow through with this surgery, within two weeks he would be dead. He couldn‘t even walk from the car to the office without severe chest pain.

"He was on 102 units of insulin and his blood sugars were 300 plus. He was on eight different medications for various things. But his first by-pass surgery was such a miserable experience that he said he would rather die than go through the second one. He came to me because he had heard that I might be able to prevent this.

"To make a long story short, this gentleman right now is on no insulin. I first saw him three and a half years ago. He plays golf four or five times a week. He is on no medications whatsoever, he has no chest pain, and he has not had any surgery. He started an organization called "Heart Support of America" to educate people about the alternatives to by-pass surgery that have nothing to do with surgery or medication. That organization, as he last told me, had a mailing list of over a million people."

Eat Your Fat NOT Your Veggies!

http://video.foxnews.com/v/4419153/eat-your-fat-not-your-vegetables/?playlist_id=86892
Great piece, well done mylady!

How Can You Be Hungry?

BLUF:  If you fuel your body like a caveman, you almost can't be hungry.  If you eat like a neolithic grain muncher, you will nearly always feel hungry unless you eat frequently. 

Why?  Your body, whether lean or obese, has enough energy stored as fat to fuel you through multiple marathons without eating.  That's not to say you could run multiple marathons without eating!  Obviously, you have other problems such as waste disposal, muscle tissue damage, and numerous other systemic imbalances that rusult from continuous exertion which are not related to 'getting enough fuel.'  But if you would accept that you have enough stored energy to fuel you through a marathon or five, you might wonder, "How can I be hungry?"

It's an important question.  The short answer is either one or two things.  One - you've been fasting for over 16 hours and your body is starting to utilize protein for fuel through gluconeogenisis.  That's not a disaster but it's not optimal and it might be expected to generate a hunger signal.  Two - you've been feeding nearly a continuous stream of carbohydrate to yourself for so long your body has lost it's capacity to burn meaningful quantities of body fat; you just don't have the necessary stores of fat burning enzymes in the cells that would allow you to run on what is your natural, normal, even premium fuel source - fat.

This is the primary obstacle to be overcome when a person wants to switch to a healthy diet - they cannot immediately reduce their carb consumption without feeling very low energy, and very hungry, because even with forty plus pounds of fat stuffed under their skin, they cannot utilize fat as fuel at the cellular level.  In effect, they are oral glucose dependent.  

Just The Basics: Saturated Fat

"Two of the authors of The New Atkins for a New You explored what happens to saturated fat levels in subjects who were placed on the Atkins Diet(4). The Atkins subjects consumed three times the levels of saturated fat as did other subjects consuming a low-fat diet. Both diets contained the same number of calories, meaning that all the subjects were losing weight. After 12 weeks, the Atkins group subjects showed consistently greater reductions in the percentage of saturated fat in their blood. Yes, those who ate more saturated fat had less in their blood stream than those who ate less sat fat.

"The two researchers then did a second study, using weight-stable men who habitually consumed a typical American diet as subjects. The men followed a low-carb diet akin to the Atkins Lifetime Maintenance Phase, which contained more saturated fat than did their regular diet. All foods were prepared and provided to the subjects during each feeding period. Enough food was provided to maintain their weight. After six weeks on the diet, despite consuming more saturated fat, the men showed a significant reduction in their blood levels of saturated fat. They also improved their triglyceride and HDL cholesterol levels, LDL particle size, and insulin level. This study further supports the conclusion that a low carbohydrate intake stimulates the metabolism of saturated fat in the diet(5). "
http://www.atkins.com/Science/ScienceArticlesLibrary/ArticleDetail395/The-Saturated-Fat-Paradox.aspx?articleId=395&utm_source=NL11162010&utm_medium=headernav&utm_campaign=article4

The Fat Is the Good Stuff

Nice to find a positive spin on fat in what is otherwise just a mainstream pub.  It's happening more often of late.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=carbs-against-cardio
"Eat less saturated fat: that has been the take-home message from the U.S. government for the past 30 years. But while Americans have dutifully reduced the percentage of daily calories from saturated fat since 1970, the obesity rate during that time has more than doubled, diabetes has tripled, and heart disease is still the country's biggest killer. Now a spate of new research, including a meta-analysis of nearly two dozen studies, suggests a reason why: investigators may have picked the wrong culprit. Processed carbohydrates, which many Americans eat today in place of fat, may increase the risk of obesity, diabetes and heart disease more than fat does-a finding that has serious implications for new dietary guidelines expected this year.
"In March the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition published a meta-analysis-which combines data from several studies-that compared the reported daily food intake of nearly 350,000 people against their risk of developing cardiovascular disease over a period of five to 23 years. The analysis, overseen by Ronald M. Krauss, director of atherosclerosis research at the Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute, found no association between the amount of saturated fat consumed and the risk of heart disease.
"The finding joins other conclusions of the past few years that run counter to the conventional wisdom that saturated fat is bad for the heart because it increases total cholesterol levels. That idea is "based in large measure on extrapolations, which are not supported by the data," Krauss says.
"One problem with the old logic is that "total cholesterol is not a great predictor of risk," says Meir Stampfer, a professor of nutrition and epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health. Although saturated fat boosts blood levels of "bad" LDL cholesterol, it also increases "good" HDL cholesterol. In 2008 Stampfer co-authored a study in the New England Journal of Medicine that followed 322 moderately obese individuals for two years as they adopted one of three diets: a low-fat, calorie-restricted diet based on American Heart Association guidelines; a Mediterranean, restricted-calorie diet rich in vegetables and low in red meat; and a low-carbohydrate, nonrestricted-calorie diet. Although the subjects on the low-carb diet ate the most saturated fat, they ended up with the healthiest ratio of HDL to LDL cholesterol and lost twice as much weight as their low-fat-eating counterparts.
"Stampfer's findings do not merely suggest that saturated fats are not so bad; they indicate that carbohydrates could be worse. A 1997 study he co-authored in the Journal of the American Medical Association evaluated 65,000 women and found that the quintile of women who ate the most easily digestible and readily absorbed carbohydrates-that is, those with the highest glycemic index-were 47 percent more likely to acquire type 2 diabetes than those in the quintile with the lowest average glycemic-index score. (The amount of fat the women ate did not affect diabetes risk.) And a 2007 Dutch study of 15,000 women published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology found that women who were overweight and in the quartile that consumed meals with the highest average glycemic load, a metric that incorporates portion size, were 79 percent more likely to develop coronary vascular disease than overweight women in the lowest quartile. These trends may be explained in part by the yo-yo effects that high glycemic-index carbohydrates have on blood glucose, which can stimulate fat production and inflammation, increase overall caloric intake and lower insulin sensitivity, says David Ludwig, director of the obesity program at Children's Hospital Boston.
"Will the more recent thinking on fats and carbs be reflected in the 2010 federal Dietary Guidelines for Americans, updated once every five years? It depends on the strength of the evidence, explains Robert C. Post, deputy director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion. Findings that "have less support are put on the list of things to do with regard to more research." Right now, Post explains, the agency's main message to Americans is to limit overall calorie intake, irrespective of the source. "We're finding that messages to consumers need to be short and simple and to the point," he says. Another issue facing regulatory agencies, notes Harvard's Stampfer, is that "the sugared beverage industry is lobbying very hard and trying to cast doubt on all these studies." Nobody is advocating that people start gorging themselves on saturated fats, tempting as that may sound. Some monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats, such as those found in fish and olive oil, can protect against heart disease. What is more, some high-fiber carbohydrates are unquestionably good for the body. But saturated fats may ultimately be neutral compared with processed carbs and sugars such as those found in cereals, breads, pasta and cookies.
"If you reduce saturated fat and replace it with high glycemic-index carbohydrates, you may not only not get benefits-you might actually produce harm," Ludwig argues. The next time you eat a piece of buttered toast, he says, consider that "butter is actually the more healthful component."