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It's Not the Fat, It's the Insulin
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Summary:
CityBeat Magazine 5/17/2001 |
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If you think fats and cholesterol can impact negatively on your health and contribute to weight gain, you’ve fallen for the commonly held misconceptions that can have disastrous consequences for your health and longevity. If you believe the propaganda spoken by the medical establishment and the large food conglomerates, you are at risk. "Food technology"has given us more low fat or fat free foods than ever before and we have more people carrying extra weight than at any time in human history. Something’s wrong with this picture.
Obviously, if you are an overeater, weight gain usually results, but it doesn’t explain the number of women that remark that they don’t understand how they could have gained weight, because they don’t eat that much. Women pay too much attention to media regurgitation, driven by advertising revenues, that too many calories or too much fat causes weight gain. This leads to voluntary calorie and fat deprivation and eating patterns that involve meals with only lean protein sources, limited or no fat or the skipping of meals. As these women age, they wake up at 45 or 55 having gained 20 - 100 pounds and believe that it’s just a part of getting older. It’s not; it’s simply poor food choices.
f you are eating low fat foods and minimal lean proteins, by definition you must eat mostly carbohydrates. If a food is not an animal product or a fat or oil, it’s a carbohydrate. Breads, grains, pasta, rice, potatoes, vegetables, fruits and salads are examples of carbohydrates. So is a candy bar. If you complain of weight gain and all you eat are candy bars (no one does this, it’s just an absurd example to make a point), we would blame the sugar in the candy bars for the weight gain. The sucrose used to sweeten a candy bar is broken down in the body to another sugar called glucose. Guess what the carbohydrates in your diet are broken down into? The same sugar called glucose. That’s right, a carrot, a bagel, those big salads for lunch and your favorite vegetarian dish all breaks down into sugar. When glucose enters the bloodstream, your pancreas responds with the secretion of insulin to manage your blood sugar. Insulin shuttles the glucose into tissue for later use. If you eat too many carbohydrates that break down into excessive amounts of glucose, the insulin will signal the body to convert the excess sugar into fat and deposit it onto the body. It’s not the fat; it’s the insulin!
The biochemistry of the carbohydrate-glucose-insulin connection is well known and unless you have a detailed understanding of it, you can only dispute this argument by quoting emotionally based misinformation that you have heard over many decades. This same connection is also now being shown to be responsible for high blood pressure, high cholesterol (dietary cholesterol has no impact at all), heart attacks, strokes, diabetes and other chronic illnesses. If you are lucky enough to have a metabolism that doesn’t gain weight, you are still at risk for these chronic conditions. This also explains why diabetics are at risk for circulatory problems and heart disease. The scientific, peer-reviewed, double blind studies are astonishing.
Dr. William Castelli, the director of the Framingham study (the study most used to support low fat diets), said in 1992 that the study actually showed that those eating more cholesterol, fats and calories had lower cholesterol levels and weighed less. We’ve been fed misinformation from that study for decades. In 1997, the European Heart Journal reviewed all major studies of diet and heart disease from the last 20 years, finding that a low fat, low cholesterol diet was ineffective. In 1999, The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition studied 238 men and found that high fat diets improve cholesterol, triglyceride, HDL and LDL levels. The low fat diets had exactly the opposite effect. I could fill this newspaper with more examples.
The answer to your health is to not fear good fats, only bad fats. The bad ones are mostly fried foods and hydrogenated or partially hydrogenated oils that contain trans fatty acids and includes margarine (read labels looking for hydrogenated oils). The best fats are from olive or canola oils, fish and nuts. Your body also needs the fats found in animal products. Consuming a high percentage of healthy fats allows you to eat between 30 and 45 percent fat each day with no negative health consequences. Fats make foods taste better and are more satisfying. Enjoy!
FROM THE "NO KIDDING"DEPT. Our local Fortune 100 company reported this week that they would severely cut back on production of the fake fat olestra, marketed as Olean and found in fat-free Pringles and Frito-Lay’s WOW potato chips. On the label it reads, "Olestra may cause abdominal cramping and loose stools. Olestra inhibits the absorption of some vitamins and other nutrients."Wow, could I have a case for everybody I don’t like? The company of course denies that this is a problem. Projections of annual sales of $1 billion have fallen short. No kidding.
Of one thing you can be sure, if man has created or altered a food product, stay away from it. This includes fake fat, hydrogenated fat, margarine, NutraSweet (also known as aspartame and Equal), saccharine and processed foods, and particularly white flour. The innate intelligence of this miracle we call the human body is that it recognizes molecules found in nature. Anything that is synthetic or altered confuses your biochemistry.
Throw them all out. Your health might depend on it.
To My Website Readers: The following article is a response to a letter to the editor that called my previous column "irresponsible". Citing her out-of-date studies with obvious design flaws, I took her to task in the next issue…it was just too easy! — Dr. Dahlman
Call Me Irresponsible!
In the last issue of CityBeat, we published a Letter to the Editor that took me to task for last month’s column, "It’s Not the Fat, It’s the Insulin". The point of my column was that a high carbohydrate diet has much more to do with heart disease, high cholesterol, high triglycerides, high blood pressure, obesity and other chronic health conditions than does fat. The letter relied on long held, common misconceptions in order to attempt to prove my position inaccurate. At the end of the letters rationale, I was also called irresponsible. I may be many things, but I am never irresponsible.
I take the health of my patients far too seriously to ever be irresponsible with any of my protocols. I am forever reading the scientific literature and with the help of colleagues, dissecting the internals of any published study. I have learned to analyze the premise, design, methods and conclusions of a study to look for any confounding factors that might contaminate the findings. There are fatal flaws in the letter’s logic.
The letter claimed that MD’s, Ph.D.’s or nutritionists would not agree with my assertion that dietary cholesterol has no impact on high cholesterol levels. Agreed! The average MD had no nutritional training and worse yet, has no interest in nutritional therapies. A Ph.D. in Biochemistry or Nutrition would be qualified to assess the literature and not surprisingly, many biochemists are in favor of low carbohydrate diets. Nutritionists are a different breed. If they are Registered Dieticians, many of them still hold on to out of date information as dictated by their state board.
The letter took my statement that dietary cholesterol has no impact on high cholesterol levels out of context. The previous paragraphs discussed the carbohydrate-glucose-insulin connection and in light of that, my statement remains accurate when accompanied with a low carbohydrate diet.
The letters attempt to prove its position was based on studies that don’t test the theory. In order to prove a theory; we must design a study that meets the requirements of that theory. If you believe that a low carbohydrate diet allows for daily fat intake between 30 percent and 50 percent of total calories, you would want studies where the participants consume very low carbohydrates and higher fat levels.
The letter did not quote studies with those criteria. It attempted to convince the readers by quoting Dr. McDougal, Dr. Neal Barnard and a study from the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition that claim that high levels of fat and cholesterol increase blood cholesterol levels and contribute to heart disease. The problem is that all the studies that support this claim had no restrictions on the intake of carbohydrates. These studies found a correlation between higher dietary fat and cholesterol levels and increases in cholesterol, triglycerides and LDL levels and decreases in their good cholesterol (HDL). All increased risk factors for heart disease. ALL studies that have high fat levels and high carbohydrate levels show the same result. Amazingly, ALL studies that are designed with low carbohydrate and higher fat intake show normal cholesterol, triglycerides, LDL’s and HDL’s or the reduction of these risk factors.
The letter also quoted a study that monitored men for 21 days and found increases in dietary cholesterol increased blood cholesterol levels. Again, a study with no criteria for carbohydrate intake, but more interestingly, all short-term studies of less than 6 months. Even those using low carbohydrates, coupled with higher fat diets show some patients have a temporary imbalance of their cholesterol, triglycerides, HDL’s and LDL’s in the short term, which normalizes after six months.
Studies have also been done on Mediterranean populations (high fat, low carb diets) and Eskimos, the Masai of East Africa and Icelanders prior to 1930 (all fat and protein diets), Each of these studies found very low levels of or non existent heart disease, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, osteoporosis and other chronic illnesses.
My reader also states that there is irrefutable evidence that animal fats and total fats are linked to increased risk of lung, breast, colo-rectal, prostate and pancreatic cancer. The Harvard Nurses Study (1990) "apparently"confirmed the colo-rectal cancer connection. Promoted by a willing media, once again the design of the study did not take into consideration total amount of carbohydrate intake. Unreported was that breast cancer cases in this study were higher in the lowest fat group and that these low fat breast cancer cases outnumbered the high fat colon cases four to one! Studies done outside the U.S. (Japan, Belgium and France), all countries with lower average carbohydrate intake found no connection between high fat and cancer. And here’s an interesting fact of physiology: cancer cells survive on sugar (carbohydrates), not oxygen, as do normal cells.
In the 1970’s, studies showed that high blood insulin levels (caused by insulin resistance) usually accompany high blood pressure (a fact no medical authority has ever disputed), high triglycerides levels and central obesity (weight gain above the waist or an apple shape). In 1985, Dr. Gerald Reaven dubbed this the "Deadly Quartet", which became "Syndrome X"in the 1990’s and in early 2002, The Journal of the American Medical Association published a paper calling it "Metabolic Syndrome". High blood pressure, high triglycerides and central obesity rarely exist without high insulin levels.
In all fairness, I must also mention studies of low fat, vegetarian diets (vegan or lacto-ovo) show reduced risk for heart disease and other chronic illnesses. These studies have been done on vegetarian cultures and recently Dr. Dean Ornish has shown that a very low fat lifestyle can reverse heart disease.
So now we appear to have a choice. Would the average person prefer an austere, limited vegetarian diet? Don’t get me wrong, I’ve eaten as a vegetarian and know if you take your time and have the proper knowledge and skills, a vegetarian meal is as mouth watering as almost any other meal. Unfortunately, the average American doesn’t have the time, knowledge or skills, and there’s one other problem: People love the taste of fatty foods. Fat makes meat tender, foods tastier and more satisfying. So where do you think the compliance will be? Sales of low fat foods have been declining recently. People talk around the water cooler about low carbohydrate diets, but you never hear them mention Dr. Ornish’s low fat diet. There’s a message in there somewhere.
What’s irresponsible is the medical establishment maintaining the status quo, considering it’s obviously not working. They perpetuate a low fat diet while never commenting on the influence of carbohydrates. Thirty-five million people in the US are obese and 40 million have high blood pressure. High blood pressure is 3 times more common and high triglycerides twice as common among the obese. We have more low fat foods in our society than ever before and more obese and chronically ill people than ever before. Something’s wrong with this picture.
If you have the discipline to undertake a low fat vegetarian diet (less than 20%) with proper caloric intake for your size and activity level, by all means do it. If you prefer the taste pleasures that fat provides, enjoy, but only with a low carbohydrate diet. If your diet falls somewhere in between, change it, your health might depend on it.
Published: 5/17/2001
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