Fiber, What Fiber Becomes, and the Related Science

It is actually because your body can’t digest fiber that it plays such an important part in digestion. Soluble fiber, like that found in cucumbers, blueberries, beans, and nuts, dissolves into a gel-like texture, helping to slow down your digestion. This helps you to feel full longer and is one reason why fiber may help with weight control.

Insoluble fiber, found in foods like dark green leafy vegetables, green beans, celery, and carrots, does not dissolve at all and helps add bulk to your stool. This helps food to move through your digestive tract more quickly for healthy elimination. Many whole foods, especially fruits and vegetables, naturally contain both soluble and insoluble fiber.

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2013/11/25/9-fiber-health-benefits.aspx?e_cid=20131125Z1A_DNL_art_2&utm_source=dnl&utm_medium=email&utm_content=art2&utm_campaign=20131125Z1A&et_cid=DM35244&et_rid=348574588

Dr. Mercola is a great force for health, but fiber is nothing but a distraction.  If folks want to eat it - great!  Get some of this to really take care of that insufficient fiber problem: SNL Colon Blow

Dr. M cites the science that "shows" how good for you fiber is, but this is the same science that shows that low fat diets are good, and has been wrong 100% of the time when used for public health.  Epidemiology can do amazing things, but is generally abused by an uninformed science press, writing to a mis-informed audience, and would better serve as fertilizer in many cases.

However, if you eat meat, vegetables, nuts and seeds, little fruit or starch, no sugar/no wheat, you are still doing what Dr. M recommends so it is a moot point.  

If I could change anything, it would be that the discussion would not be fat or no fat, carbs or no carbs, fiber or no fiber - that is simplified and reductionist language.  There are good and bad fats (saturated fats are great!), good and bad carbs (veggies, yumm), and good and bad  fiber.  However, even the good fiber is just part of the good foods we eat when we mimic a hunger gatherer diet.

Happy Thanksgiving!

I hope that you will be able to enjoy the holiday with people that you love, with a minimum of travel hassle, and some fun activities.

My advice for how to enjoy Thanksgiving eating is - chow down, chow hard, go big or go home.  Notice all the ways this impacts you.  How will you feel tonight?  How will you sleep?  How will you feel tomorrow?  How will your clothes fit?  How does the gastric napalm of Thanksgiving affect your GI business for the next couple days, and your appetite?

Hopefully, the impact will be minimal.  If not, take note!  It will help you teach the UCM what you do and don't want.

If the idea of bathing your brain, nervous system and blood vessels in a hyper-sugar fest isn't appealing, after you feast take a long, enjoyable walk to help your system burn off that extra sugar it will be struggling to manage.  If you can train hard, that's fine too, but I never want to work all that hard I fill my gut with sweet, tasty crap ... which I will!

Anthony Colpo and others like to say the equivalent of "a calorie is a calorie, so fat gain/loss is just a matter of not eating too much, and/or moving more."  They also like to say "I'm smart and you are dumb because you can't see the very clear science I see that proves this is true."

Well, I think days like today reveal how they have no clothes.  Why?  Because you can test for yourself the impact on blood sugar of eating the high sugar treats that characterize the Thanksgiving feast, and it won't be pretty.  If you test, you are likely to see hours of elevated blood sugar.  I don't think there are too many folks who would say that's not an issue for health if it becomes a long term pattern.  If you chose to, you could also test the alternative:  eat an equivalent amount of calories as moderate protein and high quality fat to see the impact on blood sugar.  I'm betting it'll be far better than in the sugar case.

In other words, the "calorie is a calorie" argument is not important for most of the folks that need to change how they eat.  What they must do is stabilize blood sugars - regain the body's natural glycemic control.  You can most easily do that via carb restriction.

There are too many blessings in my life to dig into here, but one is the chance to explore learning, teaching and helping my readers - thanks!

Low Carb Myths from Authority Nutrition

Authority Nutrition.com's Top Ten Low Carb Myths

"Low-carb diets are awesome.

"The research is clear that they can reverse many common, serious diseases.

"This includes obesity, type 2 diabetes, metabolic syndrome and a few others.

"Collectively, these are the biggest health problems in the world.

"That being said, I've noticed a problem that has been growing steadily over the past few years in the low-carb community.  A lot of dogma seems to be getting accepted and many myths that are NOT supported by science have gained foothold."

***First of all, there is plenty we can know without the "supporting science", and given the state of nutrition science, that's a good thing.  I'm all for science, but there's more bad science than good at this point, so there's only so far science of health and diet can take you.  If you doubt this, find one of the science pissing contests on the web - you know where one genius references a bunch of studies that show everyone else but him/her is a bone head, and one of the bone heads fights back with their own list of studies that proves that blue is yellow.  There could not be so much to fight about if the science were conclusive.  Immature science makes us rely on expert opinion, which has been shown to be a bad strategy over the years.  Closer to humility is better in this arena, in my humble as ever opinion.  Too bad humility sells so poorly!

That said, Authority Nutrition gives us the following "myths":

1. Low-Carb is The Best Diet For Everyone

2. Carbs Are Inherently Fattening

*** I like the nuance in this one:

"Sugar and refined carbs are bad, pretty much everyone agrees on that.

But vilifying all carbs based on that is kind of like vilifying all fats because of the harmful effects of trans fats and vegetable oils.  The truth is… not all carbs are fattening. It depends completely on the context and the type of food they are in.  For carbs to be "fattening," they need to be refined and put into a package that is highly palatable and encourages overconsumption.  A great example is potatoes. On their own, they are not very exciting. They have fiber, a low energy density and you will most likely feel full pretty quickly.  On the other hand, potato chips, deep fried in corn oil, with salt and pepper and maybe even a dipping sauce… now you've got a highly fattening food that is easy to over consume.  Many populations around the world have maintained good health on a high-carb diet with real, unprocessed foods, including the Kitavans and Asian rice eaters."

3. Carrots, Fruits and Potatoes Are Unhealthy Because of The Carbs

***They can be, but aren't for folks that are healthy, and he covers this nicely below.

4. A Low-Carb Diet Should Always be Ketogenic

5. All Carbohydrates Are Sugar

"Saying that all carbs are broken down into "sugar" is true, but misleading.  Technically, the word "sugar" includes various simple sugars like glucose, fructose and galactose.  Yes, starches like grains and potatoes do get broken down into glucose in the digestive tract, which raises blood sugar levels.  To a diabetic, it is true that starches turn into "sugar" and raise the "sugars" in the blood. But to other people, who are not chemists, the word "sugar" implies the white, unhealthy granular stuff… sucrose.  Telling people that "all carbs turn into sugar" is misleading. It makes people think that there is no difference between a potato and a candy bar."

"Whereas table sugar contains half glucose, half fructose, starch is only glucose. It is the fructose portion of sugar that is the most harmful, starch (glucose) does NOT have the same effect (7, 8).

Trying to mislead people into believing that starches are equivalent to sugar/HFCS is dishonest."

***This is an interesting perspective.  I don’t think folks spend any energy trying to mislead, they just had the blinding flash of reality – when you eat “complex” carbs, fruit, whole grain bread, and/or potatoes/sweet potatoes when you are trying to get healthy from metabolic syndrome, any of these sources of carbs can be a problem.  This bit of complexity can be difficult to communicate, and it isn’t always discerned by those eager to jump on a simple message (for example, I bet 95% of the folks who think they know what the Atkins diet is don’t know that he advocated the ingestion of lots of vegetable matter, because the simple message of “eat a lot of fat and protein” is what stuck).

For some folks, eating a 150 calorie candy bar is just as good a choice as a potato, and if it came down to it, you could as easily live without potatoes as without candy bars.   It is time and place that makes candy bars or potatoes a good/bad choice.  On a day I'm about to spend hiking around a mountain, I'm going to take a candy bar and leave the potatoes for the elk heart stew.

6. It is Impossible to Gain Weight on a Low-Carb Diet

***I'd like to think this one has been put to rest - it is very hard to get fat on just fat and protein, but that's because it's hard to eat 3000+kcal/day of just fat and protein.

7. Drinking Butter and Coconut Oil is a Good Idea

***This is one of the weaker points.  Folks that like bullet proof coffee do this, and they have good reasons for doing it.  Like much of the low carb world, it's not for everyone.

8. Calories Don't Matter

***Calories matter, and they don't matter.  What matters is if you induce metabolic derangement, and/or eat a lot of industrially produced plant based foods, you can easily eat boatloads of kcals - and still be hungry!  For many people, eating low carb foods eliminates hunger, so they eat what they need now, not as much as they can.  Additionally, the track record of folks who try to induce fat loss by counting calories is poor - very few folks have any long term success with that approach.  Finally, some folks who have researched the matter say there has never been a study that demonstrated a patient who ate the exact right amount of calories as calculated by the experts, and lost the predicted amount of fat.  IOW - those who study the "calorie is a calorie" model have proved, in a backwards way, that we don't really know what the caloric content of foods, we don't know what happens to calories in different GI tracts, and we don't understand all the ways the human body "leaks" energy.  Some of those leaks have been shown to be in response to what kinds of foods are eaten - IOW, high carb low calorie diets can make the body conserve energy by reducing basal metabolic rate, and inducing feelings of lethargy.  It is true that caloric deficit has occurred when folks lose body fat, but the ability of humans to engineer their own deficits via counting calories is rarely helpful to those who have a lot of fat to lose.  I like the way Gary Taubes puts it (not an exact quote):  "Folks don't get fat because they are lazy and gluttonous, they gain fat from too many carbs and thus feel less energetic and more hungry."

9. Fiber is Mostly Irrelevant to Human Health

***It’s a small point, but I wish he hadn’t included this one.  I could skip all sources of fiber, or eat them very sparingly, and he could never show the negative impact on my health.  I’m not opposed to the kind of fiber he’s saying is “healthful”, but I vehemently reject the mainstream idea that it’s important to eat whole grains or any other agricultural product because we need fiber in our diets.  I’ve looked and looked and can find absolutely no reason to believe this is anything but a myth. 

10. If Low-Carb Cures a Disease, That Must Mean That The Carbs Caused it in The First Place

***I think this summary is spot on, and was glad to see it written like Chris did:

“Many people who are metabolically healthy can easily maintain good health eating carbs, as long as they eat real food.  However, when someone becomes insulin resistant and obese, the metabolic rules seem to change somehow.  People who have metabolic dysfunction caused by the Western diet may need to avoid all high-carb foods.  But even though removing most carbs may be necessary to reverse a disease, it does not mean that the carbs themselves caused the disease.  Healthy people who want to stay healthy will do just fine, even on a higher carb diet, as long as they stick to real, unprocessed foods.  The prevention does not have to be the same as the cure.”

Type III Diabetes - ?

To reach her conclusions, de la Monte examined the brains of 45 deceased elderly Alzheimer's patients and found that among those "in the most advanced stage of Alzheimer's, insulin receptors were nearly 80 percent lower than in a normal brain." In healthy brains, insulin stimulates the enzyme that produces the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, the lack of which is seen as a key marker of Alzheimer's disease. In patients with Alzheimer's, de la Monte believes, the brain gradually becomes resistant to insulin.

Previous animal brain studies by de la Monte and others have supported the hypothesis that insulin resistance may be a root cause of Alzheimer's, although many researchers believe that it will emerge as just one of several possible causes, including genetics. Most Alzheimer's patients are not diabetics and while many appear to have insulin-signaling concerns, not all do.

Like Alzheimer's, diabetes has no cure. According to the American Diabetes Association, there are already nearly 26 million diabetics in the country, a number that is growing. Many diabetics do not develop Alzheimer's, but there is measurable overlap and the rates of both diseases are rising. If fatty foods provoke insulin resistance in our brains, then, as New Scientist magazine put it in a recent cover story about the link between diabetes and Alzheimer's, "we may be unwittingly poisoning our brains every time we chow down on burgers and fries."

In the New Scientist article, SUNY-Albany neuroscientist Ewan McNay said: "The epidemic of Type 2 diabetes, if it continues on its current trajectory, is likely to be followed by an epidemic of dementia. That's going to be a huge challenge to the medical and care systems."
http://www.nextavenue.org/blog/alzheimers-really-type-diabetes

This one is a great example of how one wrong conjecture shapes another.

The issue is whether diabetes results from too much ingestion of sugar, or too much ingestion of fat.  For those who have bought the "too much fat is bad" conjecture, the other issues become confusing.  For example, fat in the blood (triglycerides) is a better correlate for heart disease than is cholesterol, and if you reduce carb consumption (especially sugar/fructose) triglycerides decrease significantly for almost all folks.  But fat intake is the problem, right?  But if you eat more fat, lots of fat - up to 85% of total intake - trigs plummet.  Why?  Most likely because when carb intake goes below the toxic level, the liver can stop making trigs out of sugar (especially fructose), and the body learns how to run on fat (in the presence of high sugars, the body will run on sugar).  In short, when the body is fueled with high fat, moderate protein and the right amount of carbs, the body burns fat, does not make much fat in the liver, and regains insulin sensitivity.  These factors are all measurable - so it makes me scratch my head when I read of professionals in the field who still believe that "high fat ingestion" causes diabetes via obesity.

Burgers and fries may play a role in this, but not because they include fat.  It's the bun, the potatoes, ( especially the giant helpings and free refills of Dr. Pepper and other HFCS laden colas) that crush liver function and pile on with excess blood sugar that brings fat burning to a screeching halt and eventually leaves a person with a big belly, insulin resistant, and with chronically high blood sugars (aka, with metabolic syndrome) - almost begging to get alzheimer's or CVD or cancer (which those with metabolic syndrome and diabetes get at disproportionately high rates).

The fact that you can find cultures eating high carb diets (60% carbs), and who smoke heavily (95% in males), and don't have the diseases of civilization, while you can also find populations that eat sugar and don't smoke who do have the diseases of civilization, indicates that sugar (meaning table sugar or HFCS, both of which are 50% fructose) is likely more toxic than are cigarettes.

I think of the rumored last Japanese soldier on some pacific island who was supposedly still waiting as ordered in defense of the turf for the battle with the Americans - who will be the last medical or scientific professional to believe that fat makes you fat and sick, while sugar/carbs are the innocent bystander?

Pseudo Science

Can a teacher get in trouble for talking out of school?  Let's hope not.  This professor's critique is, in my humble as ever opinion, spot on.  I'm glad someone will say it from the "inside".  I recommend the full article.

The apparent self-interest that is driving research in this field is not limited to raising students to merely follow the herd. The subjective data yielded by poorly formulated nutrition studies are also the perfect vehicle to perpetuate a never-ending cycle of ambiguous findings leading to ever-more federal funding. The National Institutes of Health spent an estimated $2.2 billion on nutrition and obesity research in the 2012 fiscal year, a significant proportion of which was spent on research that used the pseudoscientific methods described above. The fact that nutrition researchers have known for decades that these techniques are invalid implies that the field has been perpetrating fraud against the US taxpayers for more than 40 years—far greater than any fraud perpetrated in the private sector (e.g., the Enron and Madoff scandals).

When anti-science rhetoric occurs at a Kansas school-board fight over creationism, we can nod our educated heads in silent amusement, but if multiple generations of nutrition researchers have been trained to ignore contrary evidence, to continue writing and receiving grants, and to keep publishing specious results, the scientific community as a whole has a major credibility issue. Perhaps more importantly, to waste finite health research resources on pseudo-quantitative methods and then attempt to base public health policy on these anecdotal “data” is not only inane, it is willfully fraudulent.  

Edward Archer is a research fellow at the Arnold School of Public Health at the University of South Carolina. He recently coauthored a PLOS ONE article on this topic.

http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/37918/title/Opinion--A-Wolf-in-Sheep-s-Clothing/

Mental WOD

It seems I cannot repeat this type of thing enough.  What an athlete does to regain fitness/health and stay fit doesn't matter as much as that the athlete does something, with adequate consistency.  Anyone older than 12 knows that will power is over-rated.  Goal setting is cool, but over-rated.  Determination is great, essential even, but inadequate.  Fear of death or senility or feebleness also can be good but only goes so far.  What works to keep folks on track with health and fitness in a world of folks who consistently eat toxic foods is very simple, and very difficult.  What works is to enlist the assistance of the unconscious mind, as that element of our being is more powerful in our behavior than most of us are aware.

Like a dog, the UCM does not know cause and effect, and it does not see the same reality you see.  You could imagine the UCM being like one of the folks in Plato's cave - they see the shadow of the world, but don't realize that's not the world.  You would think that a person who drinks and gets a hangover would have a powerful unconscious association with pain and alcohol, but as we mostly know, that's not true - the events take place too far apart for the pain of the hangover to associate with the booze.  What the UCM associates with the booze is the pleasure of the buzz.  Thus the drinking pattern is easier to repeat than to stop for many.  The same is true with cigarettes and sugary foods.  There's a mountain of suffering that results from eating crap, but the UCM associates to the pleasure at ingestion and fights you when you try to "eat right".

The UCM is a full contact player and like a dog (or a kid) wants two things - it wants to avoid pain and enjoy pleasure.  Anything you do or can't get yourself to do, or won't do, it's likely because the UCM pain/pleasure formula tilts one way or the other.  If you want to do more of something, you have to get the UCM to associate pleasure to that behavior - and vice versa.

How come people do miserably painful workouts day in and day out?  The pleasure of the victory, or movement, or some pleasurable emotion exceeds the physical pain.  Plain and simple.

So, to get the UCM to help you win in your quest to live with vibrant health and abundant physical capacity, you have to train the UCM.  If you have ever had success training a dog or child, you know how this goes.  All bad behaviors have to become a source of annoyance and displeasure, and all good behaviors must be rewarded in ways the UCM finds palpable.  Negatives with undesired behavior and positives with desired behavior must be delivered as quickly as possible to the occurrence of the behavior.  Clear rational thought does not get through to dogs or the UCM - passion on the other hand, emotional intensity, is everything when paired with consistency.

How does this apply to changing lifelong patterns of eating?  You have to make it annoying to eat crap, like my friend who wanted to quit smoking so everywhere he liked to smoke, he couldn't smoke there.  So, he had to stop and get into the back seat to have a cigarette instead of smoking while driving.  How could you apply that principle to your favorite nasty food or drink?  Get creative, find a way that prevents you from going head to head with the UCM (losing formula in my experience to say "I'm never going to eat XYZ again").  You can eat anything you want as long as you are standing naked in the freezing cold dodging cars in the interstate?  Well, that might be taking it a bit too far, but not a bad nugget of an idea.

A really simple start is - get all the crap out of the house.  If you have to get into the car to drive to a place to get the crap, that's going to win many times when your will power will fail.

Another recommendation: find a way to celebrate every time you go to the track or finish a day or a four hour period of time of only eating the good stuff.

It doesn't matter how fast you used to be able to run - going to the track, or whatever, is a win so give yourself a celebration - the more intensity you can muster the better!

Any day that you notice any change - throw a freaking party!  A day without cravings?  Win!  A smaller waist?  Win!  A run faster than last week?  Win!  A week or a month of getting to the gym every time you planned to?  Win!  A day of eating good, nourishing food?  Win!

Can't get yourself to feel proud of what you accomplished today?  Pretend that you are, and act like you would act if you did feel that way.  Why?  Action creates emotion - correct actions can bring desired emotions, desired emotions are a reward for the UCM.

Call your friends, post on Facebook, say a prayer of thanks, give some money to a charity, give some money to yourself, call your parents, call your kids, do something with emotion to mark the success.  You are not a world class athlete using negative motivators to torture a tenth of a second off of your time in order to beat the best competition in the world.  You have a life, it is much too short for negative motivators.  Make success a process oriented game, and give yourself some credit for any success - dammit.  Self flagellation is for monks and the Shiites, you are here to enjoy your life and getting healthy is the best way to start doing that.  You are on a great quest, have fun, when you fall or fail, put it behind you and get back in the saddle.  Learn the lesson, leave the mistake behind with no regrets, unless you fail to focus on where you want to be.

The unconscious mind responds to emotion. If you give yourself an emotion you like after each workout or eating win, of sufficient intensity, the UCM will begin to think it wants you to workout, and it will help you get there. Success comes when the UCM and the CM are aligned.  Train yours with consistency, care and passion and it will serve you better than any dog.

I understand it is the British Special Air Service who say "Who Dares Wins"

PS - for further reading, consult Tony Robbins' work, or contact my performance coach, James Murphy via www.evolutionforsuccess.com

The Rich Benefits of Eating Chocolate

Tough to keep things like chocolate in perspective - high quality dark chocolate can be enjoyed with minimal blood sugar disruption, but if you are not capable of eating only a small amount daily, just stay away until you are healthy, with stable blood sugar and close to desired level of body fat.

• Science now shows that chocolate may be good for you. Five chemical compounds contained in raw, unadulterated chocolate are highlighted to show exactly what they are and how they work.
• First, antioxidant polyphenols that neutralize free radicals provide some of the most compelling aspects of eating chocolate because they can reduce processes associated with the development of diseases like Alzheimer’s, heart disease and cancer.
• Second, chocolate contains anandamide, named after the Sanscrit word for “bliss,” which is a neurotransmitter in the brain that temporarily blocks feelings of pain and anxiety.
• The caffeine and theobromine in chocolate have been shown to produce higher levels of physical energy and mental alertness while, counter-intuitively, lowering blood pressure in women.
• Chocolate’s heart-friendly properties may be due to the presence of epicatechins, antioxidants which are found in higher concentrations in darker and raw forms.
• Studies showed that one-and-a-half ounces of dark chocolate a day for 2 weeks reduced stress hormone levels.

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2013/10/14/chocolate-benefits.aspx?e_cid=20131014Z1_DNL_art_1&utm_source=dnl&utm_medium=email&utm_content=art1&utm_campaign=20131014Z1