Physician, heal thyself: Nutritional iatrogenesis

Posted by

1

During the recent search for my father, I stayed with one of his close friends.  This friend intimated to me one of the rare confidences that my father ever made to anyone: he was deeply conflicted about his own inability as a physician to heal my mother as she was dying of cancer in 1977.  As a doctor, he should have been able to do something.  Thirty-six years later, my father has disappeared and we suspect that his Alzheimer’s disease had something to do with it.  Both my parents were physicians.  Neither were healthier as a result of their knowledge and experience as physicians.  Dr. Peter Attia speaks of this same dilemma when he discovered that he had insulin resistance, despite his following the standard dietary advice provided by the medical community.

When will the medical community realize that the advice that they’ve given to eat whole grains in order to have sufficient fiber and to reduce red meat and saturated fat, that this advice is ineffective?  Forty years of this and we have a epidemic of diabetes and obesity.  It is iatrogenic nutritional advice.  The low-carb option is out there, and there are some exceptional physicians who recommend it including Dr. Richard K. Bernstein, a Type 1 diabetic who has healed himself of the detrimental effects of uncontrolled blood sugar; and Dr. Peter Attia, who has successfully reversed the effects of metabolic syndrome.  These are the men that I respect because they have put into practice their advice and have been able themselves to experience good health.

Physicians like my parents, who die from ignorance and lack of suitable treatments, I still love and tolerate but I wish they would have an open mind.  Above all, I just wish that their advice wasn’t killing their patients along with themselves.

 

Charles Hugh Smith: The education system is doomed

Posted by

0

Why the Higher Education System Is Unsustainable (i.e. Doomed)

Here is an excerpt:

Before we start, it’s important to stipulate that the industry’s failings are systemic, and do not reflect the positive intentions and efforts of those working in higher education, any more than the systemic failures of U.S. healthcare reflect the good intentions and efforts of those employed in that industry. Despite the good intentions and hard work of individuals, these systems are broken.

Due to their size and structure, large systems such as national defense, healthcare and education limit the impact of individual initiative. This has several consequences. One is that individuals feel powerless to change the system and so they relinquish responsibility for changing it. As Voltaire observed, “No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.” A second consequence is psychological. Even if the system is visibly flawed or failing, insiders feel obligated to defend the system and their role in it, for two compelling reasons: self-preservation and the psychological need to believe in the value of one’s place in the institution.

In other words, don’t expect that anyone who derives their livelihood from the education system to be able to fix the problem.  In my view, however, when the education bubble pops, then the broken system will experience creative destruction but only by necessity.

Peter Attia at TEDMED: Is the “obesity crisis” just a disguise for a deeper problem?

Posted by

5

Dr. Peter Attia blogged about his experience at TEDMED in April, and I’ve noticed that his lecture is finally available. It is very moving. He recounts how he treated a diabetes patient in emergency with contempt because she was fat. At the time, he was self-assured about what causes obesity and diabetes, and yet, he thought, this woman let herself get into the position where she needed an emergency foot amputation to save her life. Later, he learned that obesity is probably not the disease but a symptom of metabolic syndrome, a problem which he himself now had even though he was exercising several hours a day.  The system (meaning the standard health advice as it relates to dietary matters) had let this woman down, and he asks her forgiveness for his lack of compassion and kindness towards her.

Dr. Attia admits that the medical profession is in need of humility, because if his new understanding of the role of metabolic disorder is correct, the medical profession has been giving the wrong advice to their patients for many decades.  He now suggests that obesity is a symptom not a cause of metabolic syndrome and blaming the victim of the disease is neither compassionate nor a helpful solution to the problem.

Personally, I know that I was able to shed 50 lbs of fat by eating red meat, eggs and by increasing my dietary fat, but above all, by lowering my carbohydrate intake to about 30 gm per day.  This was against the advice of a physician who said to eat less red meat, exercise, blah blah blah.  Had I followed the standard dietary advice, I’d still be suffering from my metabolic issues.  Congratulations Dr. Attia, on a helpful lecture which will hopefully stir people, especially other doctors, to do the right thing.

The Carb Bubble: On how the theme “carbs are poison” relates to this blog

Posted by

5

The US government promoted carb bubble

A person surveying this blog may find it difficult to understand how the themes of this blog, especially the latest category, “Carbs are poison”, cohere except that they all involve the author’s own concerns.  I started this blog with the idea that a Christian could be an investor, and that there would be right ways to do it and wrong ways.  So it touches upon issues of Christian ethics and praxis, especially in the area of investing and finance.  But does low carb dieting relate to these themes?

Imagine that I was writing instead about the production, marketing and exportation of a substance that causes lung cancer, emphysema, and heart disease; many ethical investors would argue that one should not invest in a product that is essentially a dealer of death.  Tobacco, of course, is off the list of many people’s investment portfolio for ethical reasons.  If I started sharing about how I stopped smoking and began to expose how tobacco is a killer; and I began to recommend that others quit smoking and stop listening to all the ads that say that smoking is cool; if I recommended divesting oneself of tobacco stocks, I think it would be easier to see the connection between the this subject of investing and Christian ethics. But people would soon become bored.  We’ve known about the evils of tobacco for decades now.  It would hardly be contrarian to oppose tobacco.

Lately, however, I’ve been railing against carbohydrates.  Unlike tobacco, which carries warning labels about how deadly it can be, carbs market freely in our world with no such  labels.  Here would be an appropriate label for a loaf of whole grain bread:  “Warning: the Minster of Health has determined that this food is high in carbohydrates; the excess consumption of carbohydrates can lead to diabetes, heart disease, obesity, cancer, Alzheimers and death.”  In the small print, “Please check your blood sugar level after the consumption of this product; you may be suffering from dangerously high, organ-damaging blood sugars.”

Food is a big part of our economy, and a large part of the population in the world suffers from diseases related to uncontrolled blood sugars that damages, among other bodily tissues, the eyes, the nerves, the kidneys, the arteries, the pancreas and the brain.  Excessive blood sugars can also feed cancerous growths and are likely related to terminal cancer.  Blood sugars spike in normal people after the consumption of high carbohydrate foods.  The person with metabolic syndrome, prediabetes or diabetes, however, will have high blood sugars for many hours after such a meal, high enough to cause cause physical damage that can lead to premature death.  These facts are scientifically verified and hardly controversial.  What is controversial are the opinions as to the best way to deal with the problem.  Most doctors, dieticians, and even diabetes specialists and associations (e.g., both the American and the Canadian Diabetes Associations), recommend that diabetics and prediabetics lose weight by avoiding too much red meat, dietary fat and by consuming a low calorie, high carbohydrate diet–i.e., they recommend that people receive the majority of their calories from the very carbohydrates that lead to uncontrolled blood sugars.  If you don’t believe me, google the “diabetic food pyramid” and see that according to official recommendations diabetics should eat a “Standard Western Diet”, high in carbs and low in meat and dietary fat.

Thus, just like my fear of hyperinflation and my investment in silver and gold, oil and gas, my low-carbing is contrarian.  All you have to do is walk into Costco to see how contrarian it is.  While I know a handful of people who have started low-carbing, including other members of my own family, the vast majority of the people you see in grocery stores are carrying about 25-100 lbs too much weight.  Rarely do you see anyone under 30 who looks like they are at a healthy weight, and when you see their grocery carts, they are always buying high carbohydrate food and drinks, such as juice, fruit, and wheat products.  The stores have multiple aisles (essentially all the middle aisles) with high carb foods that I can’t purchase or consume, and I assume they do this because these products sell very, very well.  I’ve also had some folks at my church walk away from me as I tried to explain how I lost weight on a high fat, low carb diet.

The public, it seems, is not at all aware or accepting of this reality and it seems that we are towards the end of the first stage of a low-carb bull market (“shock and fear”–not of carbs but of the good foods: e.g., red meat and dietary fat; see this post for the six stages of a bull market) of what I think is a “bull market” in nutritional change, that begins perhaps with the life work of Dr. Robert Atkins, the quintessential contrarian.

With the seminal work of Gary Taubes, Good Calories, Bad Calories; the effective diabetes therapy of Richard Bernstein, The Diabetes Solution; and the condemnation of modern wheat by William Davis, Wheat Belly, and finally, many paleo-diets, we are seeing a significant upward trend in low-carbing; however, we are still only at the beginning of the second stage of “guarded optimism” by only a few contrarian dieters.  Eventually, as with well-performing companies, the market may remain irrational for months or even years, but eventually the fundamentals will win out.  Unfortunately, many millions of people will die before this low-carb bull market comes into full swing.  The standard fear of fat and low-carb dieting still prevail.

Thus, good nutrition is like good investing.  The best hope that anyone has is to be contrarian and do the opposite of the what the majority of experts recommend.

In the meantime, we live in a major carb bubble and it manifests many signs of distress, just like the housing bubble.

  1. About one out of every four people in Canada and have diabetes or pre-diabetes.  In the United States it is almost one out of every three people.
  2. I go to an aging church: many parishioners are suffering from diseases related to high blood sugars: obesity, artery disease, cancer and Alzheimers.  However, you would never know this from our table of hospitality at coffee time–full of an assortment of high carb treats. I used to partake handsomely and every Sunday afternoon I would sleep for about three hours to recover.  Thankfully, they sometimes also offer cheese, and the occasional vegi platter and cold cuts:  I can also have the coffee with 10% cream and this contributes to conviviality, the ultimate goal of our coffee time.
  3. When I eat in a restaurant, I usually have to order a large steak (12 oz) in order to not leave the table hungry.  If you ask for more vegetables instead of potatoes and bread, they are unable or unwilling to provide adequate quantities, so the only way to compensate for it is to order a over-large steak.  I haven’t seen a low carb restaurant yet, though some have a few low carb choices.
  4. Marketing promotes low fat products, even when they are loaded with carbs:  e.g., low fat honey.
  5. Marketing promotes “heart healthy whole grains”.  The book Wheat Belly explains how that is actually quite the opposite of the truth.
  6. Some ethicists have promoted the eating of grains instead of meat in order to fight world starvation.  For example, Christian writer Ronald Sider, Rich Christians in an age of hunger (IVP Press, 1977) famously claimed that it takes thirteen pounds of grain to provide one pound of meat, and that Christians should respond by eating grain directly instead of feeding it to livestock (p. 42-43).  We now know that these grains are poisonous to many people.  What are they supposed to eat when meat is off the table?  Didn’t Jesus declare all foods clean (Mark 7.19)?
  7. Sugar and grain industries have had great success in lobbying to the effect of having their products declared safe for human consumption, even for diabetics.  The bacon and egg industries have been far less successful.
  8. Governments have largely promoted high carbohydrate dieting (see USDA food pyramid above).  Thus, like the housing bubble, the carb bubble is a beneficiary of various kinds of government policy and stimulus.  Government literally promote nutrition which destroys the health of the population.

Exercise to lose weight to avoid or treat diabetes? Give me a break

Posted by

2

A few years ago, a missionary friend of mine visited us here in Ontario.  He was keen to go fishing, and so one early afternoon, we rented a canoe at Lake Opeongo and headed towards North Opeongo beyond which was located our campsite.  But the winds were against us and soon they had driven us to the far shore of East Opeongo; and so we had no choice but to make camp there despite not having a permit for that area.  My friend was in pain, especially in his shoulders and he slept badly.  I thought it odd that a few hours of paddling had put him in such agony.  The next day, he called canoeing an “extreme sport”.  A few years later, this same friend had to leave the mission field for a medical furlough.  His vision had clouded over and the diagnosis was Type II Diabetes; his hbA1C was 14%. He had undoubtedly been suffering from hyperglycemia and experienced a bout of severe tendonitis from our little excursion.

I remembered this story recently, as I was thinking back about the many sports injuries I myself had suffered trying to stay active to lose weight.  Peripheral neuropathy destroyed my ability to canoe–the tingling in my hands was too severe; it also hindered weight training.  Later, weight training became impossible when I experienced debilitating rotatory cuff tendonitis.  Often, after playing basketball, I couldn’t even walk for three to four days, and I frequently suffered from Achilles tendonitis, a couple times so bad that I needed crutches.  I had lost most of my flexibility, but if I stretched, I could cause severe injury to my tendons.

It is commonly thought that an effective treatment for diabetes is exercise.  That’s fine and may help, but if the patient has tendonitis, peripheral neuropathy, or loss of proprioception (loss of coordination–I often fell inexplicably when working around the house, walking up steps or when doing sports), then the devastating effects of high blood sugars would make exercise at best difficult at worst impossible.  Diabetics and prediabetics who like me suffer from tendonitis must first control their blood sugars before they can expect to exercise.  In his book, Why we get fat and what to do about it, Gary Taubes makes an important point:  We don’t get fat because we don’t exercise.  We don’t exercise because we are getting fat.  In other words, therapists (e.g., physicians and nutritionsts) who recommend losing weight and exercise to treat obesity and diabetes–i.e., the vast majority of the imbeciles who practice medicine and nutrition–have a buggy-driven horse.

As soon as I gained control of my blood sugars I began to notice major improvements.  After a couple weeks, though I had the energy to walk, I still suffered injury to my knees and Achilles tendons, but now these problems are much less severe after exercise.  Before I started to low-carb, I tried to do my rotator cuff exercises after a hiatus of many moons; I suffered an immediate relapse of the tendonitis which took a couple weeks to lessen.  It is clear to me that I couldn’t exercise to lose weight that way.  But now that my blood sugars have normalized after four months of low carbs, I can pretty much exercise every day as necessary.

I am exercising in the evening to achieve perfectly normal over-night blood sugars and I am having considerable success with it.   This is about fine tuning the blood sugars. That is impossible on a high carbohydrate diet, and it is often cruel to recommend to diabetics that they must exercise to control blood sugars.

I become angry when I read that diabetics and prediabetics must exercise and lose weight to control their diabetes.  Rather, those of us who suffer from hyperglycemia must first achieve normal blood sugars via low carbohydrate diet, and then the weight loss will take place naturally and exercise will become possible.  I look forward to going canoeing again now that my peripheral neuropathy is gone.