This explained a lot to me about why I get a rapid, pounding heart when I eat carbs

Taubes, page 151.

"Since the late 1970s, investigators have demonstrated the existence of other hormonal mechanisms by which insulin raises blood pressure--in particular, by stimulating the nervous system and the same flight-or-fight response incited by adrenaline. This was first reported by Lewis Landsberg, an endocrinologist who was then at Harvard Medical School and would later become dean of the Northwestern University School of Medicine. Landsberg showed that, by stimulating the activity of the nervous system, insulin increases heart rate and constricts blood vessels, thereby raising blood pressure. The higher the insulin level, the greater the stimulation of the nervous system, Landsberg noted. If insulin levels remained high, so Landsberg's research suggested, then the sympathetic nervous system would be constantly working to raise blood pressure. "

From Chapter Seven
Fiber


"I don't hold the cholesterol view for a moment," Cleave said, noting that mankind had been eating saturated fats for hundreds of thousands of years. "For a modern disease to be related to an old-fashioned food is one of the most ludicrous things I have ever heard in my life," said Cleave. "If anybody tells me that eating fat was the cause of coronary disease, I should look at them in amazement. But, when it comes to the dreadful sweet things that are served up....that is a very different proposition."

So far that's my favorite too. I may find another once I get further into the book. I read that one last night and actually got out of bed at 1:30 am to find my yellow highlighter

I like that analogy about the cigarettes!

I'm beginning to think the answer to your first comment is Job Security. Can the medical establishment be this ignorant? It makes me nuts. Reminds me a little of when I first read about Essiac, the treatment for cancer and how the medical establishment shut down the nurse who was curing people with the formula.

I don't think they want their cash cows to disappear. Cynical, aren't I?

I am on page 131.

I am so pissed off I think my head is going to explode.

All I can say to all the people who promoted, encouraged, reported and supported wrong BAD information is "YOU BASTARDS!"

Pages 394-397:

I didn't copy them but what I read is that in response to a high carb meal the muscle cells can become resistant to insulin while the fat cells never become resistant. Meaning only so much carb can enter muscles to be used for energy while any excess is always able to be shunted to the fat cells.

He says the body switches easily from fat-burning to sugar-burning. The moderator is insulin. Even small amounts of insulin will inhibit fat cells from releasing fatty acids. As a runner that suggests to me that post-workout carbs might do more harm than good.

You know, over the last year I've done a lot of thinking -- and to be fair, "waffling" -- about the "ultra (very) low carb" which is really what constitutes what most people call low-carb plans. I've made several attempts to shift from an either lowcarb or standard (highcarb) dietary plan into a "carb cycling" plan that would be VLC interspersed with a few days every couple weeks of more. I've read enough about bodybuilding nutrition the last 12 months to pretend expertise on the subject. I've worked pretty hard on finding a way to rationalize why some degree of carbs are ok, either in general or cyclically (by 'some degree' I mean say 100 a day). I react to gluten, and gluten-free stuff is only highcarb, which is so exasperating it makes me want to stomp my feet like a three year old in a tantrum about it. So I've been trying, trying, to find something that I consider a "sane middle ground."

But books like Taubes's being quoted here (keep them coming, I can't buy it right now but really want to and will eventually, but love the quotes!) make me realize there's a sort of fundamental fallacy about my logic on this one:

It's like on some level, my brain's been thinking that the highcarb 'norm' of our culture is 'bad for me, though maybe it's ok for others' and lowcarb is 'good for me', so gosh, if only I could find something somewhere between the two, how much easier eating with others would be, how much more convenient my food choices would seem, even if they were perhaps 'less perfect' from a VLC standpoint.

But I think maybe carby eating isn't just bad for me. It's just deadly, period.

The idea that I want to be able to feed my kid fairly carby stuff because it's easier/faster, more fun for her, and I'm not trying to make her ketogenic (and what she eats elsewhere doesn't support LC anyway), I've been thinking, despite her weight gain over time (mostly from her dad feeding her mac&cheese and McD for 18 months--she seriously needs to lose 1/3 her body weight at this point), that I shouldn't be "forcing my lowcarb on her" because it's "not normal" as anyone in my family would remind me.

But maybe all the carby crap is what is not normal. Maybe measuring norms by today's marketing-driven society rather than "human biology" is the problem. Maybe thinking mondo carbs are ok "but just apparently not for me" is the real problem if cancer and heart disease etc. are killing off huge swaths of our population.

Maybe the link to obesity is that the carbs create metabolic syndrome which in turn has a huge effect on disease. So people aren't more likely to have a disease or heart attack because they are fat, one could just as fairly say, they are fat because they are prone to things like greater risk of health issues -- both the fat and the health issues being based on the same core problems -- and those problems being based on the same core nutrition.

So maybe I just can't find my way out of it. I keep looking for a path to Why I Can Eat Some Kind Of Bread and Stuff and I just... can't seem to get there from here. The more I read about the effect of substantial carboyhydrates on the body, the more I'm frankly amazed that our entire society isn't dying off at twice the speed it already is.

Gary's book seems to bring this home. The quotes posted so far are great.

Exactly!!!!

Within the last 2 years, my father and three close friends have all been diagnosed with high blood pressure and type 2 diabetes. While my dad is 65, my friends are in their mid 40's to early 50's. I even have a tiny, skinny friend who has been diagnosed with high blood pressure and my husband's buddy is on statins to lower his cholestorol...and he is pretty thin too.

They aren't dropping dead yet, but they are all on a bunch of pills designed to keep them alive. Of course, none of them were told their symptoms are very likely to disappear if they stop eating so many carbs. But what fun would that be for the doctors and the pharmaceutical companies?

I have many friends with "sugar diseases" (I'm gonna call them that, because that's what breaks us), almost all of my girlfriends have either 1)high fasting blood sugars, 2)a lot of excess body fat, 3)high blood pressure, or 4)female troubles like PCOS. All of us range from 30 to 36! At this age we should be out there turning heads instead of being fat and exhausted at home!

Out of them one realized that she can do something about her health and has changed her eating habits. She's not gone low carb, but she's gone less carb and seen results.

Three of them are operating on bad advice from the medical community and no amount of me telling them what I've learned is going to change their minds, so I don't. It's not up to me to impose my lifestyle changes on others, it's something they have to do for themselves.

One of them has decided that there's nothing she can do about her health, that it's all just random. I predict a very miserable life her for in the future, and that breaks my heart.

The other thing all of us have in common is a sugar addiction. And until that is cured, nothing much will change. I'm slowly conquering mine, and learning what sets off cravings has been really helpful. But since there is no social stigma against eating sugar there is no outside pressure to stop, and more and more people are going to be getting fat and miserable younger and younger.

I broke down and bought the book. It is packed so dense with information that I can only read about 10 pages at a time, and then I have to wait a few hours to digest it all. I'm somewhere in the third chapter. One of my favorite quotes was showing that feeding rabbits oil gave them signs of heart disease, and that other scientists scoffed at those findings because rabbits don't eat oils and fats.

Hi All,
I'm at work so can't post my favorites at this minute but I wanted to remind everyone who is reading the book to post a review at Amazon. There are a number of low ratings obviously posted by Ornish or PETA ppl. I can see them now like little apes with their fingers in their ears chanting la la la, Don't want to hear this.

He traces the problem to excess insulin. Body builders are all pursuing moments of excess insulin because it also helps build muscle. But the chronic high sugar levels in the blood also lead to generating lots of AGE's which... age you. They make your skin old, make your heart stiffen (something both my parents had in the 70's, neither were diabetic), makes tangled plaques in the brain, the make the lenses of your eye harden and go opaque, they basically make you old and crippled.

If you want to eat carbs and stay healthy, you have to calorie restrict, like eat 20-30% fewer of the calories you'd normally eat to maintain your weight.

Another thing is, body builders are not fat. I used to try to use those eating techniques too but the difference is, I'm not a body builder. I'm a fat, middle-aged woman. I personally don't think they're people I'd like to emulate at all really, too many of them do risky things like take steroids or abuse drugs. And playing with your own insulin is probably pretty self-abusive too. I know whenever I had a high carb meal when I was "carb-cycling" I felt horrible with the pounding heart and everything else.

Oh yeah, what I originally was going to say was, we're fat for the same reason we're sick, not sick because we're fat.

We're fat because we're sick, not sick because we're fat.

I think I need to put that on a sign....and then when someone says something stupid like "you just need willpower" or "cutting carbs is dangerous" I can beat them over the head with it

Taubes, pages 339:

Look at this another way. When Bruce Bistian and George Blackburn instructed their patients to eat nothing but lean meat, fish and fowl, 630-800 calories a day of fat and protein--half of them lost at least forty pounds each. That success rate held true for "thousands of patients" from the 1970's on. Bistrian said, "It's an extraordinarily effective and safe way to get large amounts of weight loss." But had they chosen to balance these very low-calorie diets of fat and protein with carbohydrates--say, by adding another 400 calories of "wonderful fruits and vegetables," as Bistrian phrased it--they would then be consuming the kind of semi-starvation diet that inevitably fails: 1200 calories evenly balanced between protein, fat and carbohydrates. "The likelihood of losing forty pounds on that diet is one percent." Bistrian said.

I'm always saying I want to document my daily weight in a thick book so everytime someone spouts 'the calorie lie' at me I can whack them upside the head with it.

When I shop, I sometimes feel like I'm badly representing lowcarb because I'm so fat and people see all this eggs cheese meat veggies in my basket. I'm sure they're thinking, "Look at all that FAT, no wonder she's fat!" They don't know I've lost a lot of weight, a lot of medical symptoms, have vastly more energy, etc. I sometimes wonder if I should wear an obnoxious pin (remember those "I found it!" pins in the 1970's?) on my purse or something that says, "I lost 100 lbs, lost acid reflux, asthma and more! GO LOW CARB!" but then... that would be too evangelical even for me. ;-)

I think a book like Gary's is super important not just because of people reading it because the reality is, most the people who read it, are already open to the topic. What's useful is that all those people have his book as reference material, so when they talk to others, post on message boards etc., now they have actual ammunition against all the false, misleading, etc. stuff and they can combat it better. It might, in a longer-term way, contribute to better communication on the internet, which can contribute to at least a few people onlooking getting a clue.

Several of your comments resonate with me, RightNow. I deliberately ate a quite carby meal last weekend for my birthday dinner. I didn't go crazy but I had what I wanted, which included BangBang Shrimp (a tempura fried shrimp with very spicy sweetish curryflavored cream sauce on it), Lobster with butter, Fried Calamari with Thai dipping sauce (it was full of sugar, think spicy duck sauce), and finished with a Creme Brulee. Can you say Sugar!!!!

About an hour after eating this meal, I was having hot flashes, my heart was pounding, I felt sweaty all over and I would bet my blood pressure was up 10 points. I had a slight headache and just overall could tell my metabolism was just flipping out. This continued for several hours. I used to experience this after a large meal but always blamed this particular type reaction on the couple glasses of wine I usually would have with this sort of meal. Uh...guess what. It ain't the wine, kiddo. Note, this was the first such meal I've had in about 3 months.

I'm being my own Weird Science Experiment, admittedly, but I'm of the opinion that refined carbs will kill me if I give them enough chance.

I would say absolutely YES to this>>>> But I think maybe carby eating isn't just bad for me. It's just deadly, period.

I don't know about you, but I ALREADY have Metabolic Syndrome! I'm absolutely doing everything in my power to reverse it as quickly as possible before I develop full blown coronary disease or diabetes. No help from my stupid doctors (whole 'nother story there).

I think we need to understand fully that we are playing with fire when we allow high glycemic carbs into our meals. Perhaps weightlifters and bodybuilders can do it. I'm not one. I suspect you are not either. They likely don't have the kind of screwed up metabolism I have and carb loading may work just fine for these guys.

What sets most of us apart from bodybuilders and why I do NOT attempt to subscribe to their practices at this time in my life (and I'm an old BFL vet), is that I do not currently possess a healthy metabolism and I think eating carbs is like playing Russian Roulette with my health.

Another amazing thing. I weighed 191.4 on Sunday morning after that meal. Up almost 4 lbs overnight. I have lost it this week, in just 4 days by eating a great deal of FAT. Yes, fat. How strange is that?

As always, the standard disclaimer: just MY two cents worth.