I think even ordinary life and doctors give people the totally wrong ideas about food.

My stepmother (diabetic) went to Outback and ate most of a huge bloomin' onion. This is like super-thick-batter deep-fried and then you dip it in a thick sweet sauce.

The next morning she had her blood drawn. There was a really high fat percentage in it (literally it looked horrible). The nurses and doctor assured her this was obviously because, at that point 12 hours earlier, she had eaten SO MUCH FAT that it was STILL roaming around her bloodstream, "see this is how high triglycerides and cholesterol happen."

And it's all because that giant breaded sauced onion was fried...

How do you possibly combat this kind of thing when it's doctors and nurses telling people so? Fatty food = fat in the blood = see, you have high cholesterol and diabetes, have some statins.

And next time, BAKE the heavily battered sweet sauce food, to avoid that fat!

PJ

Just from what short reading I did hear, and forgive me that I did not read every reply - as someone said we did not have/see a baseline before he started the lc diet, we don't know how low his low carb plan was, and even 3 months in his numbers could still been "bad enough" to classify him as a diabetic. The last part is what I'm seeing. A lc wol is the best way, in my opinion to treat it.

He was normal weight and athletic, so I doubt anyone ever screened him for diabetes before now.

Dr. Davis wrote about how eating grains, in particular, raise your triglycerides. You eat a meal and that raises them. When you eat carbs, they never fall back down to fasting levels again. So it builds, and builds, and builds all day long. Over time, your triglycerides get high even when fasting.

Eating low carb they disappear much faster. So before your next meal, they're back down to where they were when you had breakfast.

This isn't really true, well it is sorta true... but misleading. Everyone cut way back on fat because we were told that it was bad for us. It was replaced with more carbs. We got hungrier, thanks to the carbs, and ate even more carbs. Also people are eating stunning amounts of sugar, at even very young ages. T2 diabetes used to be an older persons disease, now it is showing up in children and even babies. Probably mom's diet is to blame too.

Now the message is getting out that fat isn't so bad. So yes, people are now (probably) eating more fat.

No one can draw the causality between obesity and anything. Not us, not McDougall. For all we know it has nothing to do with food at all.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-ma...p_b_609383.html

Did you know just over 40% of the population actually has lead poisoning that is measurable? And that even the CDC says that even *below measurable levels* STILL has symptoms?

Just one of many examples of possible non-food factors that might be affecting us.

That wasn't the article that I wanted, but I think the one I wanted is on that site somewhere -- there is a far more indepth article on the topic I read years ago that blew my mind.

Turns out there's well over 100+ articles on that site solely about lead poisoning. (Some about it in china and nigeria.) A search link has a huge list of them is here. https://www.google.com/webhp?source...isoning&start=0

PJ

Really? You think she's lying?

The Kempner Rice diet reversed T2 with a diet that was basically rice and fruit. So it's not the carbs, but the combination of carbs and fat that seems to be the problem. And the reason I started this whole thread is that it seems like people who choose lowcarb, high fat for their T2 don't always have complete success. Dr. Atkins had patients with this problem and he put them on his "meat and millet" diet. I'm sorry....I can't find the exact quote...maybe somebody with the Atkins '72 book can chime in. He basically put them on a much higher starch diet.



The reason I posted this is not because I think his lchf diet caused his diabetes, but because it should have prevented his insulin resistance/pre-diabetes from escalating into full-blown T2 diabetes.

I'm not saying that she didn't get off her medication. I was the one who brought up the Rice Diet in the first place, remember?

My problem is with the idea that animal products, in and of themselves, outside of particular dietary context, cause type II diabetes. Or that Professor Noakes is making himself "more and more insulin resistant." She doesn't know that.

I would say of course the ADA diet doesn't work, but for different reasons. It's such a weak prescription, it's hard to tell it from the SAD.

Add a fatty pork chop to the Rice Diet. You've probably ruined any therapeutic effect. Same if you added enough rice, sugar, or fruit to a ketogenic diet. You can't make french toast without eggs and bread. So, is the cause of french toast eggs, or is it bread? I can have bread, but if I avoid eggs, french toast will not happen. Therefore, bread is not the cause of french toast, but eggs are. I can't choose a cause here, I just have two elements that need to be kept separate.

It's all about dietary context.


As for actual causation, rather than therapeutic approaches to put diabetes in remission--increases in meat and fat around the world have gone hand in hand with increased consumption of wheat, sugar, vegetable oil etc.

I do think that meat can be guilty in the same way that fat, sugar, salt, msg can be guilty--small amounts of it can greatly increase the palatability of some pretty craptacular foods. Canned ravioli is a good example. There's not much meat actually in a Big Mac--but it sure does make the rest of the sandwich a lot more tempting.

Statements such as "people have been gradually increasing their animal fat and protein and processed food diets" is just false and an irresponsible statement for grouping the three categories. According to the National Health and Examination Survey (NHANES) conducted since 1971 for 5-year periods at 5-year intervals, the amount of saturated fat consumed by males decreased by 14%, by females a small increase of 3% up until the last data in 2006. To lay the current health epidemic at the feet of animal fat is a hollow, unfounded accusation. Feinman in the book The World Turned Upside Down, The Second Low-Carbohydrate Revolution discusses NHANES and its results.

To make that statement without understanding the contributions of the 3 components mentioned, and to include "processed food," which can be anything, but is often a combination of fats (type not specified to include polyunsaturated or trans fats), carbs (sweeteners/starches), and chemicals masquerading as flavor enhancers demonstrates the degree of the absence of knowledge in this case. I can and have summarily dismissed this statement. However, when statements like this get distributed, it becomes unfortunate that some reading this rubbish are inclined to believe it. That's the damaging part in a statement of this nature.

HappyLC, it's a sad fact that ANYTHING CAN BE PROVEN ON THE INTERNET.

I can take 15 minutes and find a bunch of people claiming that eating 30 bananas a day has cured them of everything.

For the past sixty years there has been masses of peer-reviewed studies that indicate saturated fat causes heart attacks and you can exercise away the effects of eating a diet high in grains and sugars.

Personally, I can't believe my metabolism could handle eating nothing but rice and fruit. I believe I would soon look and act clinically insane from the roller coaster blood sugars, and I know I can't get enough protein from a vegetarian diet, much less such an extreme vegan one.

I know eating this way is counter intuitive and it's the opposite what most of us has been told our whole lives.

But that doesn't make it untrue.

In the eighties, me and my Dad were into Robert Haas's Eat to Win diet. Similar to Ornish or McDougall, very low fat, only slightly less paranoid about animal products. This is about the same time I got my mouth full of fillings. I don't blame the diet alone, timing was probably bad--a diet poor in protein and various fat soluble vitamins paired with teenage bones that insisted on growing might not have been the best thing for my teeth. But that's leading the witness. I can't know for sure what caused my crummy dental health at the time.

So, back in the eighties, my Dad tried a few times to get his mom to eat like us. She gave two answers. One was "how long do you expect me to live?" The other was "if I can't have bacon and eggs for breakfast, what's there to live for?"

And.......... this is why, "bollocks." Not because I begrudge a near-vegan approach for people it works for. There are people who hate low-carb--not in a personal way, not that they mind people eating that way. But people show up on this forum now and again, who don't like meat and fat. It's kind of weird to me--but it's true. It's good that there are options out there. That's one thing I like about the intermittent or even extended fasting option--besides being particularly effective, it also opens up people's options. I think it also increases the effectiveness of either one of the other approaches. One thing many paleo/low carbers and vegans seem to be able to agree on is that it's not that bad an idea to take an occasional break from eating, entirely.

If people look at these as options, instead of world-views--a Rice Dieter could have enough protein, at least every other or every third day--I'm sure something could be worked out--to stay in nitrogen balance, or at least minimize lean mass loss. Because make no mistake about it, there will be lean mass loss on that diet, for a lot of people. Kempner claimed that after a brief adaptation period, the body would adapt, and the loss of lean mass would be minimized. I've only seen one study where somebody tried to reproduce this result, it didn't work, nitrogen balance stayed negative.



http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC439507/

One problem with nitrogen balance studies is that the longer a person has been losing lean mass, the less protein it may take to maintain equilibrium. If that one individual with hypertension was particularly muscular, it's possible that it just took longer than usual to get to balance.

Yes low carb isn't perfect, and when it doesn't resolve all of a person's issues they need to look further. Higher protein? Higher fat, lower protein? Occasional carb-ups? Fasting? For all we know, a week of Atkins followed by a week of the Kempner rice diet, rinse and repeat, would have all the advantages of both, and none of the disadvantages. Take low carb away as an option, and everybody's not going to switch over to the Rice Diet and experience remission of their diabetes--even assuming it would work if everybody were to do so. There is no question in my mind that there are lives being saved here.

I've been down the google rabbit hole and back on this subject. Vegan diets have been shown to help some diabetics but I've not seen any research that is as compelling as low carb/high fat.

Some of the research is very telling too - one of the vegan diets involved keeping people in a hospital ward and giving them prepared meals. The "rice" diet involved the guy whipping people into submission to eat the food.

I don't recall anyone having to do that to ensure compliance on a low carb diet :-)

'If people look at these as options, instead of world-views--a Rice Dieter could have enough protein, at least every other or every third day--I'm sure something could be worked out--to stay in nitrogen balance, or at least minimize lean mass loss.'

Options instead of world views. Whether WOE, economics, politics, religion, land use. The world would be a happier place. I'm sure something could be worked out. Yes.