Commentary on the ADA

[bluesmoke]

Here's a post on a good blog discussing the ADA:
http://diabetesupdate.blogspot.com/

[ojoj]

Wow, I kinda knew this was going on, but..... Theres no answer though is there!

great article

[mike_d]

Any time research proves that cutting out most carbohydrates from your diet--especially those supposedly "healthy whole grains"--improves the health of people with diabetes, the ADA says, "More studies are needed." Meanwhile they put their stamp of approval on high carb junk foods made by companies like Campbells ... Not so coincidentally a top ADA sponsor is Cadbury & Schweppes.This really sounds like a conspiracy to me, and I am not a believer in every conspiracy story that comes along.What wasn't explored at all by this study was what happens if you tell people to test AFTER MEALS and explain to them that if their blood sugar is too high, they can bring it down by eating less carbohydrates.
But as we all know, the ADA, which receives major funding from the big food and snack manufacturers, refuses to tell people with diabetes that they can change their blood sugars by cutting carbs.http://diabetesupdate.blogspot.com/2006/08/bad-science-ada-type-2-bg-testing.html

[eryalen]

This really sounds like a conspiracy to me, and I am not a believer in every conspiracy story that comes along.http://diabetesupdate.blogspot.com/2006/08/bad-science-ada-type-2-bg-testing.html
It's not a conspiracy, just human nature. Like any organism (except lemmings), they will do anything to survive

[bsheets]

It's not a conspiracy, just human nature. Like any organism (except lemmings), they will do anything to survive
Human instinct? No, it's business and profits, baby!

When humans don't have money at the forefront of their mind, they don't do these kinds of things. Humans are a lot more loving, I believe (touch wood).

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[CVH]

We need the ADA, among other agencies to keep the machine running and the population occupied, the average human is dumb, the average IQ is only 100, humans are comfortable being lied to and deceived and happy with having everything structured for them, the vast majority at least.

Mass panic, chaos and other things would occur if anything in the system is disrupted, humans are not intelligent or "stable" enough to deal with things like that.

Those who are seekers will find the truth and become enlightened, those who aren't will live happily in ignorance, why disrupt their lives?

[Dodger]

It's not a conspiracy, just human nature. Like any organism (except lemmings), they will do anything to surviveThe lemmings allegedly suicidal behavior is an urban myth (http://www.snopes.com/disney/films/lemmings.asp). The legend was due to a faked Disney 'documentary'. Almost all the Disney nature shows were faked.

[Nancy LC]

Wow, I had no idea they had done that!

I guess "like lemmings committing suicide" should take on a new meaning of faking information and hoodwinking millions of people... sort of like what the low carb folks did. It isn't what the lemmings did, but what the audience did, slurp up bad information and cling to it for decades.

[rightnow]

I guess "like lemmings committing suicide" should take on a new meaning of faking information and hoodwinking millions of people... sort of like what the low carb folks did.
I must be misunderstanding this quote above lol.

[Nancy LC]

Read Dodger's posting above mine.

[Demokat]

The lemmings allegedly suicidal behavior is an urban myth (http://www.snopes.com/disney/films/lemmings.asp). The legend was due to a faked Disney 'documentary'. Almost all the Disney nature shows were faked.

Disney lied to me? You just shattered my fond childhood memories! :cry:

[ojoj]

you mean Mickey's not real????????????

[Demokat]

This really sounds like a conspiracy to me, and I am not a believer in every conspiracy story that comes along.

Neither am I, but there's plenty of solid evidence-on this website and Dr. Eades' blog-pointing to the conflicts of interest between the scientists, researchers, and doctors who push the low-fat/high-carb agenda and Big Pharma and Big Food.

[rightnow]

The unfortunate thing is that this so often gets many innocent-but-ignorant people along the way. For example, it is the cornerstone of food edu in medical school, so a ton of doctors who otherwise wouldn't recommend it at all, if they knew, then believe totally in the highcarb approach.

I can imagine that when a doctor occasionally does enough reading to realize what is 'real', it must be very disillusioning -- and guilt inducing.

[ojoj]

Neither am I, but there's plenty of solid evidence-on this website and Dr. Eades' blog-pointing to the conflicts of interest between the scientists, researchers, and doctors who push the low-fat/high-carb agenda and Big Pharma and Big Food.


I dont think its rocket to work out that if cavemen ate what humans were basically designed to eat (and in my opinion thats a "given" otherwise we wouldnt be here), then all the manufactured foods, sugar, flour, chemicals, colouring, preservatives... which have been added to our diets in the last 30 years or so, must have some bearing on our modern ailments/deseases ie, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, cancers.... But multi billion dollar/pound industries have built up around these foods - there would be an enormous global crisis if the truth were allowed out, so maybe there is nothing anyone can do

Its always seemed odd to me, even before I low carbed and looked into it, that something as basic as sat fat, red meat, cholesterol, any unprocessed food (and even sunshine come to that) should cause these illnesses when man has been eating them forever - it has to be the recent stuff and the huge quantities that are causing the problems doesnt it??? and of course the cr~p they put into our unprocessed stuff (anti biotics, pesticides etc)

[eryalen]

The lemmings allegedly suicidal behavior is an urban myth (http://www.snopes.com/disney/films/lemmings.asp). The legend was due to a faked Disney 'documentary'. Almost all the Disney nature shows were faked.
I didn't think Lemmings existed, I thought they were mythical, like Unicorns.

[Dodger]

I didn't think Lemmings existed, I thought they were mythical, like Unicorns.And Australians!

[teaser]

I think it's maybe more like the ADA followed the lead of the American Heart Association. They thought high levels of fat in the diet would cause heart disease, which diabetics are particularly susceptible to. They had the miracle drug insulin to fight the dangers of carbohydrate.
I think the high blood levels of glucose which the ADA calls acceptable are aimed at the lowest common denominator. If blood sugar goes too low, there is the risk of short term coma and death, while the risks of high blood sugar are usually more long term. They want a buffer, so the less 'talented' patients won't end up hypoglycemic. (A buffer made up of artherosclerosis, lost limbs, blindness... My grandmother suffered from the first and third of these and was constantly threatened with the second.) According to Bernstein, early on they didn't think any patient was capable of properly monitoring their blood sugar at home.
Later on it's very hard to reverse course. Having seen yourself as the man on the white horse, the idea that you may have made things worse must be very difficult to contemplate.

[Angeline]

you might be right teaser. It's hard to believe in conspiracies. I might not have that much faith in humankind, but I have faith in their inability to hide a large-scale secret. Yet the tobacco industry did attempt to hide the toxicity of the product, so conspiracies do happen.

Yet this is so huge I have to wonder. I'm 80% through reading Gary Taubes's book and I have to be amazed at the human capacity for self-deception. I think that maybe the people are the ADA have simply convinced themselves of the "truth' and vigorously refuse to consider anything else. It's easy to do. Every time you read something that counters your sacred belief you just reject with a facile explanation. "Oh low-carb is a just a low-calorie diet in disguise". "Oh that's all very nice, but no one can follow a low-carb diet. And if they do they will die of heart disease." If you get enough of these mantras, then you can simply reject anything that you disagree with, without having to actually read it and think about it.

You see this phenomenon all the time. We have probably all done it ourselves. I've seen it here often enough.

I remember the first time I heard about the evil of sugar. It was in a book called the Sugar Blues. I remember reading parts of it and then tossing the book aside with a snort. I could never do that I thought, cut all the sugar out of my diet.

The second tine I read about low-carb, was the Montignac method. It's a sort of low-carb approach, except you alternate low-carb, high fat with low-fat, high carb. Anyway, it's now passé, but I remember thinking it was a fad diet and that all that fat couldn't possibly be healthy. So I rejected it out of hand without really considering it.

It took reading Gary Taube's Big Fat Lie to finally open my eyes.

But the point I am making is that it's really very very easy to close your eyes to what you don't want to see.

[rightnow]

Yeah. The one thing about alleged conspiracies is that it does not take anything deliberate for it to happen. Human nature, human psychology, being geared toward conformity to a good degree, and human society, being geared toward easy answers, accepting authority, competition for research funding, and having a tendency to find what we want to find in that research (even when it's not there at all...) can all combine to what appears to be one gigantic, astounding 'conspiracy'. But at best it's usually an "accidental" conspiracy; one brought about by the combined consistency of human weaknesses, not by intentional planning.

Although for some, it's pretty clear, there is intentional planning.

The thing about having 'experts', especially when they also write "for" the government etc., is that it doesn't really take a conspiracy. A relatively small group of people in the infamous "old boys club" psychology we encounter all the time in life (not just in science), can have enough clout, funding, and socio-political influence, to dramatically revise and set in place something even if it's wrong.

In a way it's less conspiracy than cult psychology. But then when that gets established and big money gets invested into the research and into products the research indirectly 'supports' and into government agencies and more that also 'supports' both of the above, then we're in a situation it's darn hard to get out of -- and at that point, albeit many involved aren't even aware of it, it actually can become a conspiracy. But at that point, the conspiracy did not create the giant scope of it. (Almost no conspiracy can create anything that big.) It just kind of came in as a side-effect once the overall movement, factors, money and situations and people, were in place.

[Angeline]

Well said Right Now. Another thing that struck me in Gary's book is the human' penchant for taking the easy answer. You'd think that researchers, with their smarts and knowledge would avoid that trap, but so much of dogma
that came to pollute our pool of knowledge seemed, at first, like the easy answer. Forget complicated metabolic pathways and multiple enzymes interactions, people are fat because they simply eat too much. Forget exquisitely precise homeostatic regulation mechanisms for burning and delivering fuel at the cellular level, a calorie is a calorie is a calorie.

I wonder how many hypothesis were simply disregarded because they were secretly considered too complicated and the researchers didn't understand them.

[eryalen]

And Australians!
I find that hard to believe as I actually saw an Australian once (nice guy but a warped sense of humour, I guess from being upside down so much).

[mike_d]

But the point I am making is that it's really very very easy to close your eyes to what you don't want to see.Some good points have been made here.

I never thought about low-fat as a "cult phenomenon" where followers require heroic methods such as "deprogramming" just to see that a rice cake is not as healthy as a slice of natural bacon :lol:

[Angeline]

Here is a good example from Gary's book

George Cahill, a former professor at the Harvard Medical School, is a pedagogical example. Cahill has done some of the earliest research on the regulation of fat-cell metabolism by insulin in the late 1950s, and had co edited the 1965 Handbook of Physiology on adipose-tissues metabolism. In 1971, when Cahill gave the Banting Memorial Lecture at the annual meeting of the ADA, he described insulin as “the overall fuel control in mammals.” The concentration of circulating insulin,” he explained, “serves to coordinate fuel storage and fuel mobilization into and out of the various depots with the needs of the organism, and with the availability of lack of availability of fuel in the environment.” When I interviewed Cahill in 2005, he told me it was true that “carbohydrate is driving insulin is driving fat.” But Cahill did not consider this chain of cause and effect to be a sufficient reason to speculate that carbohydrates drive obesity. Nor did he consider it a possibility that avoiding carbohydrates might reverse the process. Rather, he believed unconditionally that positive caloric balance was the critical factor. When it came to weight regulation, Cahill repeatedly told me, “a calorie is a calorie is a calorie.” He acknowledged that the obese ate no more, on average, than the lean, and this is why he believed that the obese must be fundamentally lazy* and this was the proximate cause of their obesity. There was no reason to test competing hypotheses, Cahill said, because any competing hypothesis would contradict the laws of physics as he understood them.

*He told me that I could confirm this observation by simply going to an airport and noticing, as he always did, that it was the overweight who took the escalators and the lean who walked up the stairs.

So there you go. Who needs scientific study when you can learn all you need to know from passing through an airport.

And why has it never occured to him that maybe his understanding of the laws of physics is flawed, or incomplete.

[rightnow]

Yeah, I liked that example too. It's just a textbook case of someone having a personal prejudice and no matter how bright or informed they are, that prejudice literally overriding some "connection" or "logical end-result" of that information, because it would interfere with their prejudice.