Today I have my oncologist appointment, 17 1/2 years after diagnosis of breast cancer. Already had a clean MRI so we often just chat about diet and exercise. His wife eats "Paleo", he is a whip thin runner, so he wants to know what I do now to maintain a steady 22 BMI. I’ll share:


A healthy BMI is now my "big why".

Janet, my thoughts are with you, and I'm certain the superb metabolic health you've achieved will continue to serve you well. Your focus on health and learning to adapt to optimize your WOE to achieve health has served you well. Sharing the information as you travel your journey is one of the bonuses we get on this forum. While we all don't get the same results, using your reports of success or not has enabled many of us to experiment and find better ways to evolve beneficially.

Great, insightful comment, WB. The reason I used the term phenotype (instead of genotype) is due to the fact that our genes are expressed in part due to our genetic makeup, and most likely in a larger part by our environment, which includes everything we are exposed to including what we eat and drink. In addition to Mark Sisson, we can include Tim Noakes, Mark Cucuzzella, and Sami Inkinen, who were competitive endurance athletes with little body fat who had to fight diabetes. Yes, we are all unique in certain ways we respond to foods and how our genes are expressed, but achieving a good degree of metabolic health levels the "playing field" and makes life a lot easier.

Sharing another video interview sponsored by Levels with the title:

Is Fructose a Driver of Alzheimer’s Disease? | Dr. Richard Johnson & Dr. Rob Lustig


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbWE-J1JpKs

Very informative, detailed discussion by two who came to the same conclusion from different directions. This covers all topics of metabolic derangement caused by the fructose pathway. By the middle of the discussion, they agreed that they need to publish together, as their respective studies start to supply a fuller picture of metabolic derangement due to diet. It's one of those that us geeks will watch or listen to more than once. Very valuable, actionable information.

About Levels
As a side note, the video sponsor, Levels, provides a method of continuous glucose monitoring without a prescription, which is currently required in the US to get a CGM device and usually requires insurance coverage to defray the cost. The Levels monitoring system is very expensive, as it's a subscription that includes a CGM and a phone application. The price of the Levels phone App subscription is $199/year, the CGM is a Dexcom 7 with monthly supplies of replacement sensors for $199/month. To get started, the price for the first month is $407 on sale, with $199 charged every month thereafter.

The FDA has approved purchase of CGMs without needing a prescription to begin this summer. I have a few family members who would like to wear them to track their BG responses from meals and other activities. Does anyone know where a reasonably-priced CGM system can be purchased??? Levels is not a reasonable option for someone who doesn't have T1D or T2D at its current pricing.

Here's another excellent interview with Dr. Thomas Seyfried that belongs in this thread based on subject matter. It's far ranging on all topics of metabolic health, diet, cancer causes, and prevention. Not familiar with the interviewer until this interview. She stays on point and asks good questions:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwhRskOPwVk

I was going to add Dr Champ's excellent new article, If Society was a Patient https://colinchamp.com/if-society-was-a-patient/
but Gary Taubes' Sub Stack article needs to take precedent.

Life Lessons from the Recently Departed?
A short discourse on the limits of evidence

https://open.substack.com/pub/unset...cently-departed


The "chance" aspect is what makes cancer and other diseases so scary and open to wild speculation (it's the saturated fat!, sugar, fructose, PUFAs, GKI ratio, or any other one solution!). Any doctor who proposes that they have a diet that prevents cancer, or not eating sugar will reverse cancer, needs to read this.

To Dr Champ, simply following a low carb or low fat diet without also considering nutrients and exercise and maintaining a healthy weight, is not an optimal lifestyle. I met him once as a patient, he was part of my process to focus on getting more nutrients and maintaining a healthy BMI.

Dr Champ writes:

As they say in quantum circles, randomness is only a lack of information. But we can't get enough information in bodies that evolution worked on over zillions of years. Much less the individual changes as different peoples spread over the globe and ate different, local, stuff. Then adapted in different ways.

I see some recognition of how food works happening in the population. Had a lovely brunch Sunday, first time in MONTHS for what used to be a routine gathering. But my heart aches to see how much one couple is relying on modern medicine and pills, another had a scare and is willing to adjust their diet to Mediterranean, and the two people who think they don't have to, yet.

It's a great place and I'm able to eat there without worry, but more and more, I can't eat the way they do, and I don't want to be the "ghost at the feast" so I don't say anything. But in my area, gluten free is easy to find in my little tourist town. And that's why. The bigger population is doing things to the restaurant where there are still actual cooks in the kitchen, and even local ingredients.

That tells me awareness of individual food needs/nutrition is growing, along with the explosion of autoimmune.

Just in the last twenty years look at the revolution in how we look at food. There's bad, as the increasing wave of absolute junk with healthy stickers plastered all over them.

But we also have new science in bioavailability, including the recognition of the food matrix, with its role in proper fuel and supplies. We haven't updated our vitamin RDA and maybe we should. Protein is finally getting its due as a macro-nutrient, for instance.

JEY and I are excellent examples of how wide the range is, because my macros and hers are so different, in terms of low carb flexibility. But we both avoid junk. I think that is the biggest and best first step anyone can take.

We've all been marketed to about "harmless indulgences" but that was before they put stuff in the food. Before we knew they distorted research for decades. Before we had 80% of the population suffering some form of metabolic derangement.

Judging from the brunch conversation, everyone is at least talking about their health. Thinking about it. It's the first step.

After all, these are the civilians. They don't have the training or the motivation we do!

Back after reading and this:



was an enlightening paragraph for me. Because it kind of emphasizes that this is an individual quest. For DH, a musician, it's about rock stars... and when we lose them. He knows their history of poor behaviors which offer more explanation when they are young than when they are older and perhaps have been compensating for that time period.

So many variables, really, that what we need to do is study people who have successfully figured out what they should eat, losing weight and easing health conditions. That's the new patterns, not made up confusing "Mediterranean" diet stuff.

And that work has been done.

That was the paragraph that caught my eye as well. Bernstein being able to manage and thrive with T1D is something very rare and worth noting.

Reading Taubes' article prior to it being changed from Bill Walton dying of prostate cancer to colon cancer, it's well done and asks the key questions. It also reinforces some facts: 1) we are all different and luck or whatever we want to call fate is often at play in random ways, 2) arguing about which dietary approaches are preferable is always confusing, especially when those who refer to themselves as "experts" are involved.

Good post by Janet. I'd make one clarification on the following statement:

Agree that I'm always skeptical of anyone touting (sometimes selling) any diet that purports to prevent cancer. I would also argue with anyone claiming that not eating sugar reverses cancer unless it can be proven in multiple trials. Reversing cancer is a tall task dependent on lots of things including fate/luck. Not eating sugar to avoid metabolic disease including cancer seems to me to be the best bet when dealing with the same fate/ luck. We do have science showing lower risk of cancer with the avoidance of dietary sugar.

My third thought is a non sequitur, but something I've been contemplating off and on for the last 20 years: How in the world is Keith Richards still alive!!!!!

LOL, my exact thought when WearBear wrote "Rock Stars"!

The comment about Rock Stars sent me to google to find out what Mick Jagger eats. (I already knew he spends hours almost every day exercising - can't dance like he does on stage through an entire concert if you don't keep your muscles in shape)



Assuming this was from an actual interview with Jagger, interesting that he turns to keto for energy and body fat management.

There was also a small amount of info about Keith Richards diet:



There's an article from back in the early 90's about Keith's drug, smoking, and alcohol habits - way too much that would need to be ****ed out to quote on here, but the gist of it is that even by that time he wasn't keeping drugs and pot around, and he was also being very picky about the quality of the drugs and pot he used, so while he wasn't going to turn it down if someone offered it to him, he wasn't doing much of it by that time.

Apparently he's given up almost every vice since then - and now only drinks occasionally.

If you don't mind the language, you can read it here:
https://www.dingonet.com/articles/a...cracklepop.html

The way that he looks so haggard and so wrinkled though - to me a lot of that comes down to genes.


But as a group:

Also, the original Stones were all poor kids at a time when Britain struggled to get everyone their minimum rations. They have always been thin, too. There were studies done after WWII showing that not overfeeding children helped them maintain a healthy weight when they grew up. This British generation wasn't immune, but there was important lessons there.

And they are all older than me but I already know that what matters as we get older is much more how we feel than how we look. How much keto? I was likewise intrigued by that mention. Gee, maybe the keto is what is doing it, and the Mediterranean, which encourages bread and pasta, is the indulgence.

A common saying around our house, from the movie Wayne's World, is "You know Keith Richards cannot be killed by conventional weaponry."

But science has not yet discovered why

Fascinating, especially the amount of exercise a day. If you had said 50 years ago that these two would still be alive, popular, and performing grueling concert tours today…would never have believed it.

WearBear…I wondered if "keto" is used to eat enough fat for energy. Three hours of intense exercise requires a boatload of calories, high-fat keto can be used to recover and gain weight. The original therapeutic use of "keto" to control seizures without dying from lack of energy.

My take on the number #1 Longevity factor…his 28” waist, a waist half height, or BMI < 25. https://optimisingnutrition.com/what-is-a-healthy-bmi/

But I think this kind of comparison is also an indicator of more money/less stress in their environment. Not that they don't work, but it is in bursts, with layers of luxury a common traveler doesn't have.

Also, I've been told that working is something they do when they want to, meeting large expenses, from multiple exes and children to high levels of their own self-care.

I know they have chefs and coaches and housekeeping staff. They're not packing a lunch in their kitchen, a suitcase in their bedroom, and taking a bus to the airport.

Stress is a big factor in health and it does sound better to me!

While the UK as a whole was relatively poor and rationing food for several years after WWII, the guys in the Rolling Stones were not actually poor when they were growing up. I was kind of shocked a while back when I read that unlike most 60's rock groups, the Stones did not grow up poor, and were relatively well off.




The only other thing I've come across about Keith's childhood was from the article linked in the other post - that apparently his family has a very strong tolerance for alcohol, although he insisted that he couldn't get drunk any more, that alcohol just didn't affect him any more.

That might have something to do with why he supposedly only drinks "occasionally" now - if you're not getting a buzz from it, why bother with it any more?

Who knows how much of that interview was true and how much of it was just alcohol infused nonsense though - if someone is sitting right in front of you drinking hard liquor and insisting that they're not drunk because they find it impossible to get drunk any more, how reliable is that?



Jagger's dad was a phys ed teacher though, so Mick was brought up in a home where his dad made sure he got plenty of exercise all the time. That physical education probably extended to his dad making sure the family had as much of a balanced diet as possible (4-food groups, since this was back before the low fat/high fiber era), which it sounds like is what he eats most of the time now.

Rationing during their early childhoods might have had something to do with them not overeating and gaining too much weight to begin with, but I would imagine that most of it was simply a matter of - you just didn't overeat back then, because there was so much less addictive food around than there is now. It doesn't sound like they've drastically changed their eating habits to include fast food or UPF's either - easy to eat whole foods when you have someone doing all the shopping, prep work, and cooking for you after a hard day of exercising and dancing or practicing your guitar licks, especially if there's no financial worries about not letting good food go to waste.

If they didn't grow up being pushed to eat everything on their plates, there also isn't that internal guilt that pushes some of us to finish everything even when you feel like you're done.

(Apparently the GLP-1 drugs help overcome that guilt to eat it all too - I hear "I was too full, and just couldn't finish more than half of it")