02 Feb Are you a Victim of Diet Circumstance?
The circumstances being what the latest trend is on how way to lose weight: Your botox nurse sells the HCG diet and you try it. You see a commercial for Nutritsystems, you sign up. There’s an article in Women’s or Men’s Health on low-fat diets or counting calories and that’s what you do. Kim Kardashian sells caffeine and laxatives as a detox, so you take those for a while. So how’s all that working for you? Still fat, tired, and unhealthy? Well, there is a reason for that….those things don’t really work.
Here’s the deal on calories:
The results of a study were published in June in The New England Journal of Medicine-
“This study shows that conventional wisdom — to eat everything in moderation, eat fewer calories and avoid fatty foods — isn’t the best approach,” Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, a cardiologist, an epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health and lead author of the study, said in an interview. “What you eat makes quite a difference. Just counting calories won’t matter much unless you look at the kinds of calories you’re eating.”
“There are good foods and bad foods, and the advice should be to eat the good foods more and the bad foods less,” he said. “The notion that it’s O.K. to eat everything in moderation is just an excuse to eat whatever you want.
The new research, by five nutrition and public health experts at Harvard University, is by far the most detailed long-term analysis of the factors that influence weight gain, involving 120,877 well-educated men and women who were healthy and not obese at the start of the study. The study participants — nurses, doctors, dentists and veterinarians in the Nurses’ Health Study, Nurses’ Health Study II and the Health Professionals Follow-up Study — were followed for 12 to 20 years.
Next, how we got rooked into low-fat diets:
This diet was mainly for heart health and to lower cholesterol. But it doesn’t work for that either. This is what happened-
In the 1950s Ansel Keys published an analysis, now called “The Six Country Study”, in which he claimed a connection between dietary fat and heart disease. What people may not realize is Keys based his conclusion on information from only six countries even though he had data from 22 countries available to him. I think I detect a deficiency in math!
Two of the countries for which data was available, Mexico and Finland, had almost equal fat consumption. Yet the death rate from heart disease in Finland was 24 times that of Mexico! So when someone who could count, looked at all the data from all 22 countries, the so called-link between saturated fat and heart disease disappeared.
In 1957, even the American Heart Association (AHA) came to the conclusion that the evidence that dietary fat correlates with heart disease does not stand up to critical examination. BUT, Ancel Keys was on a committee which issued a new report recommending a low fat diet for Americans at risk for heart disease.because of Keys’ committee report, the AHA changed its official position in 1960. Since then you have become a victim of dieting circumstances!
Ok, so what is good for you, lowers cholesterol, triglycerides, weight, insulin levels, sugar levels, lessons joint pains, helps with energy and doesn’t feed yeast or cancer? How should I know? Only kidding! A LOW SUGAR/STARCH DIET! No, not an Atkins-never-eat-a-vegetable-or-piece-of-fruit-again diet. A diet that excludes bleached flour items like bread, pasta, cookies, donuts, cakes, crackers, cereal, pancakes waffles; sugar items like candy, sodas, and potatoes with a side of white rice.
The first low-carbohydrate diet book was written in 1863 by William Banting, entitled Letter on Corpulence Addressed to the Public. So you can see that this is not a new concept. What you may not know though, is just how important of a concept it is.
Controlling your insulin levels is one of the most powerful anti-aging strategies you can possibly implement. Sugar and grains (meaning things made out of flour) cause your body to produce a hormone called insulin and high insulin levels are the single largest physical cause of accelerated aging and getting fat. If you want to slow down aging and be healthy and lose weight, you need to quit eating flour and sugar.
Creating a release of too much insulin will lead to insulin resistance and that is the basis of all of the chronic diseases of aging, cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis, obesity, diabetes, cancer, all the so-called chronic diseases of aging.
Fortunately, insulin is the variable most easily influenced by a healthy diet and exercise. Which means YOU can control your insulin levels by eating a low sugar/starch diet and exercising!
So basically, there are 3 consistent blood metabolic indicators of all centenarians which are relatively consistent: low sugar, low triglycerides, and low insulin. All 3 are relatively low for age. Among these 3 variables, insulin is the common denominator. The level of insulin sensitivity of the cell is one of the most important markers of lifespan.
So your best bet to keeping your weight down and living a while is to quit eating starch and sugar
References
Diabetes Care 2000;23:1348-1352
Annual meeting of American Society of Clinical Oncology, New Orleans, May 23
National Cancer Institute 2002 September 4;94(17):1293-300
Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis, and Vascular Biology August 2001;21:1346-1352
These recommendations are for the reduction of stress only. They are not intended as treatment or prescription for any disease, or as a substitute for regular medical care.