Pain, Pain, Go Away!

I just found this from the Vitamin D Council: Also, readers should be aware (if they are not already) that vitamin D does not prevent all viral respiratory infections. As we noted in correspondence to our first influenza paper, rhinoviruses, the most common cause of the common cold, are not seasonal; that is, they are just as common in the summer as in the winter, and they do not have a lipoprotein coat for antimicrobial peptides to destroy....If you are already taking 5,000 IU a day and you get a cold, chances are that more vitamin D will not help much. No one should take large doses for more than a few days and then only if the infection is severe(1) However, vitamin D levels are inversely associated with upper respiratory tract infections .(2) If you haven't been taking any vitamin D, a moderate dose might help. Nevertheless, I have (mostly) gotten over my cold faster than some acquaintances, who came down with colds before I did and are still sick. (One coworker

Regular Janes and Joes who watched the TV program Catalyst: Heart of the Matter on saturated fat, cholesterol and heart disease are probably confused now. What is this idea that saturated fat is good for you and that sugar and inflammation may cause heart disease? Everybody knows that saturated fat and cholesterol are bad, right? Regular Janes and Joes don't need to be doctors or scientists to consider some of the evidence for themselves. Or in this case, the lack of evidence. For forty years, and using hundreds of thousands of people, researchers have been trying to prove that saturated fat and cholesterol cause heart disease. The result, according to Dr. Robert Grenfell of the National Heart Foundation of Australia: When you ask that question of 'Do dietary fats increase heart disease?', you're sort of trying to negate all the other risk factors that, in fact, actually also cause heart disease. So, to imagine creating a study that would prove that conclusivel

Rat chow: that's what Ensure and Enterex Diabetic drinks remind me of. I'm not into protein drinks anymore--haven't been in years--but my parents are elderly and it's hard for them to cook. They're also diabetic, and yet my father's doctor recommended two Ensure drinks per day. That's 80 grams, or 18 teaspoons, of liquid sugar. The main ingredients in Ensure: Water, Sugar, Corn Maltodextrin, Milk Protein Concentrate, Soy Oil, Soy Protein Isolate, Cocoa Powder (Processed with Alkali), Pea Protein Concentrate, Canola Oil.  Seriously--the second ingredient is sugar. (Corn maltodextrin in a starchy food additive.) Isn't that a big ol' clue that this isn't suitable for diabetics? A pharmacist recommended Enterex Diabetic . It has fewer carbs, but 24 grams of liquid carbohydrate is too much at one sitting for many diabetics. The ingredients: Water, Maltodextrin, Sodium Caseinate, High-Oleic Safflower Oil, Calcium Caseinate, Fiber (Soy Fib

My last post discussed the book It Starts with Food and the principles it's based on. Going over the post, I realized that the part about hormones raised some questions. How do cells become insulin resistant? How can too much insulin lead to weight gain? Does too much carbohydrate cause leptin resistance? I'm looking again at the book Endocrinology: Basic and Clinical Principles by Shlomo Melmed and P. Michael Conn from 2005. The book says it isn't clear how insulin resistance develops, but says that it is a "key feature of the prediabetic 'metabolic syndrome' (central obesity, hypertension, insulin resistance, and dyslipidemia)" (page 318). It doesn't say how to reverse it. The book does say that insulin promotes fat formation and inhibits fat burning: Insulin promotes lipid synthesis and inhibits lipid degradation. Before insulin became available for treatment of type 1 diabetes, patients with this disease were invariably thin, reflecting

Answer: because probably, nobody else will. Awhile back, my mother's new primary care doctor saw her for a checkup. According to Mom, the doctor took her blood sugar and wrote "diabetes out of control" on her chart and prescribed Metformin and Lantus (insulin). The doctor didn't look at the blood sugar records Mom brought. Maybe it's the new medication, maybe because an infection cleared up, or maybe Mom has gotten more insulin sensitive, but she's been getting hypos in the morning. It's dangerous to have blood sugar get too low during the night. The doctor is hard to reach, and who knows how good she is at dosing insulin. Mom had been fiddling around with her evening insulin dose, but without checking her blood sugar first. So today, after she got her blood sugar up from this morning's level of 55 (70-100 is normal), I suggested she check her blood sugar before taking her evening insulin. When she checked it tonight, it was 70. After doing some

It takes anywhere from seconds to years. It depends on the issue, the person, their diet, and their lifestyle. Lierre Kieth, for instance, felt better the instant she started eating meat again--the tuna was like prana in a can. (Sadly, her back pain from the damage caused by long-term B-12 deficiency will never go away.) There have been a lot of 30-day challenges out there: 30-day paleo, 30-day Whole 9 , even 30-day gluten-free from Dr. Guyanet. (He actually had a terrific blog before he started going on about food reward.) I think these challenges last long enough to get allergens out of your system and let you see if re-exposure bothers you, yet they're short enough to seem manageable. Thirty days is more than long enough to begin clearing up GI problems caused by food. My GERD disappeared within a few days of starting a low-carb diet, and two days on a fat fast cleared up my gastritis. Some issues can take much longer. Almost a year ago, two of my teeth were knocked out of

My mom is back to normal, able to walk a little with a walker and doing a little cooking. Perhaps because her recent infection is gone and she isn't eating any more hospital food, her blood sugars have gotten low enough that she's decided to reduce her insulin dose. My TMJ pain has been acting up. But last weekend, a friend invited me to her restorative yoga class, and the next day, for the first time in weeks, I didn't need any aspirin. I'm planning to take her class on a regular basis. I had some anxiety that's now gone. I've always been good on the phone, and good on the Internet, but tended to get kind of freaky in person. I was the weird girl in The Breakfast Club. The anxiety defied all reason and most experience. And yet it just evaporated over the past couple weeks. Why? I quit all dairy except butter around two months ago and I'm finally finished healing from my bike wreck. Those are the only things I can think of that happened recently. There

Re: the movie Cereal Killers , a documentary about a man who starts researching heart disease and puts his own hypothesis to the test, has reached a milestone. This just in: We are delighted to report that Cereal Killers has reached the 100% funding milestone on kickstarter folks! To each and every one of the 183 persons who have carried us over the line and into new terrain - THANK YOU! SO...What happens next? Well for us, we just take a deep breath and we keep going.... The momentum, awareness and goodwill generated by a successful kickstarter campaign is only bettered by a super successful kickstarter campaign. Sometimes projects REALLY catch fire and that's where we're aiming next. Kickstarter promotes projects that look like they're gonna take off, and they do that based on the number of pledges and the hype a project is creating on the internet. Now that we have reached our target, every £1 pledge or tweet or facebook share adds weight to our visibil

There's a lot of conflicting dietary advice around, but conventional wisdom contradicts itself on diet for a healthy heart v. diet for healthy teeth. The commonly recommended heart-healthy diet is low-fat, little meat, lots of whole grains, and fruits and vegetables. That doesn't quite square with "Foods and Drinks Best for Your Teeth" from that pillar of medical dogma, WebMD.com: The best food choices for the health of your mouth include cheeses, chicken or other meats, nuts, and milk. These foods are thought to protect tooth enamel by providing the calcium and phosphorus needed to remineralize teeth (a natural process by which minerals are redeposited in tooth enamel after being removed by acids). Other food choices include firm/crunchy fruits (for example, apples and pears) and vegetables. These foods have a high water content, which dilutes the effects of the sugars they contain, and stimulate the flow of saliva (which helps protect against deca

The polite brush-off answer: because I'm not you or them. Answers that require more thought: Metabolism doesn't improve with age. I could eat crap, or have nothing but a bun or soda for lunch, when I was nineteen and it didn't bother me. Much. Most people that age can say the same. Now that I'm 44, I usually can't fast and more than a little carb makes me tired and hungry and gives me a stomach ache. A high-nutrient, low-carb diet and three meals/snacks a day is my way of dealing with it. Genes. I'm from a family full of diabetes and hypoglycemia and used to have most of the symptoms of hypoglycemia listed in Dr. Atkins' Diet Revolution. Expecting someone like me to do well on a "balanced diet" (i.e., lots of starch, little meat) of three meals a day is like putting gasoline in a diesel truck and wondering what's wrong. Natural and Artificial Selection. Richard Dawkins has written about animal species undergoing natural selection wi

They tried to make me go to rehab, I said no, no, no. -Amy Winehouse My mother is home from the hospital, where she arrived weak and dehydrated last Thursday. She thinks that an antibiotic made her ill.* My mother uses a wheelchair but she can stand up and she can walk with a walker. She couldn't use her legs when she went to the hospital, but by Monday, she could transfer herself from the bed to the wheelchair with no help, just someone to spot her. The hospital wanted her to go to rehab, but like Amy Winehouse, she said no, no, no, for good reasons: She felt well enough to go home. Rehab is expensive. They feed you a crappy diet at rehab--crappy meaning full of carbage. It's especially unhealthy when you're diabetic, like my mother. Got normal blood sugar? They're johnny-on-the-spot with the orange juice to jack it back up. Mom was assaulted at a rehab center a few years ago. The person was never brought to justice. Being home and careful about her diet

Short answer: many health care providers don't attempt to control it. Reading medical literature from the early 20th century, it looks like doctors of that era fought diabetes with everything they had: low carb diet, urine testing for diabetics, a hospital stay with a strict diet if there was sugar in their urine, and yearly testing of family members of diabetics. Insulin started being used in the early 1920s. Now? Some health care providers call a low-carb (diabetic) diet "old dogma" and don't counsel patients on diet or blood glucose testing. This was the case with a friend of the family, who was recently diagnosed, and my parents. While my mother was in the hospital recently, she was allowed to order any breakfast from what was basically a dessert menu: cinnamon rolls, cereal, juice, bread, waffles, french toast, pancakes, fruit, etc. Hopefully, patients who want to control their blood sugar aren't allergic to eggs, the only LC option for breakfast. Some

There's a hungry kind of feelin' And every day it grows There's so much more of you Than anybody knows In the ADA, we eat more sugar before 9:00 am than some people eat all day.* Eat all the carbs we say 'Cause we need you in the ADA.** In the American Diabetes Association, you'll be eating pancakes, fruit smoothies, oatmeal, cereal, peanut butter, toast, vegetable juice, eggs, and lean Canadian bacon for breakfast --and you'll be eating again before lunch! (I can tell you from long experience that the protein won't quell hunger from falling blood sugar.) Just look at all the sugar you'll get to eat: Three pancakes from Hardee's: 12g sugar (53g net carb) Banana berry 16-size smoothie from Jamba Juice: 73g sugar (80g net carb) One packet of prepared Quaker instant oats, apple & cinnamon: 12g sugar (23g net carb) Two tablespoons of smooth peanut butter on a slice of toasted wheat bread: 5g sugar (16g net carb) One cup of V-8 vege

The past few months have seen me spending a lot of time in dentists' offices. A few observations: most of the dentists and their employees are fairly svelte--at least, more so than the medical staff at a hospital or nursing home. The dentists also advise against eating sugars and starches, knowing what they do to teeth. Why aren't there more dentists in the low-carb internet community? Heaven knows we need all the allies we can get--and help won't come from most dieticians, nurses, "health organizations" (not when they take money from junk food and pharmaceutical companies), medical journals, government, or MDs (not even endocrinologists). To wit: "In January 2012, the North Carolina Board of Dietetics/Nutrition informed [blogger] Steve [Cooksey] that he could not give readers personal advice on diet, whether for free or for compensation, because doing so constituted the unlicensed, and thus criminal, practice of dietetics." Institute for Justice &

Regular readers may know that I have dessert for breakfast (and sometimes dip for dinner). But the past few weeks saw me working long hours at ramming speed. Something had to give: it was my almond meal chocolate cookies and Dr. William Davis's low-carb brownies, both made with nut flour. This had a happy result (besides the good paychecks): the five pounds I put on a few months ago when I discovered these is leaving my midriff. It isn't the lack of sweetness at breakfast, since I've been having low carb, dairy-free chocolate custard for breakfast instead--two big pieces of it, along with coffee with coconut oil. I haven't completely given up nuts, I just don't have them every day, and when I do, I eat a handful of pistachios. With all due respect to Dr. Davis, I can't eat unlimited nuts and keep a flat belly. Dr. Richard Bernstein is on to nuts raising blood sugar,(1) and therefore, for some of us, causing weight gain: Nuts Although all nuts contain c

This just arrived in my email: Today the Institute for Justice will file a First Amendment case in North Carolina, where our client, Steve Cooksey, is being threatened with criminal charges for sharing through his website dietary tips and advice that saved his life. State officials are demanding that Steve acquire a government-issued dietician’s license in order to offer insights through a Dear Abby-style column. To learn more, please watch this short video about the case: www.ij.org/paleospeechvideo . Thank you for making this and all our work possible. Chip

Mary Newport M.D. discusses reversing her husband's Alzheimer's disease with coconut oil. Meantime, A team of biochemists at England's Oxford University have developed a ketone ester. It makes quite considerably higher levels. You can get whatever levels you want, depending on how much you drink. The problem is they need millions of dollars to mass produce it. It is very expensive, and so we can't make very much of it ourselves. What we would like is funding so we could actually scale up and make it. Of course, there is no real profit in manufacturing stuff like that. Dr. Newport states that Alzheimer's is becoming known as diabetes 3--diabetes of the brain. Brain cells become insulin resistant and cannot accept glucose--one of their fuels. Without fuel, the brain cells die. Enter ketones, the brain cells' alternate fuel. You could spend millions of dollars researching a ketone ester, but why not make your own ketones? All you have to do is follow a low

Highjack the lead: the follower in a partner dance taking over the leading. Over the past year, I've read more and more about biased research, corrupt nutritional organizations, and doctors whose advice is, well, not very helpful. In my experience, a doctor is useful for knowing about illnesses going around, and which medicines (if any) will cure them. If you have concerns about a protocol you're doing against medical advice, a doctor can monitor you. I've had good and bad experiences with various doctors. I don't think most of them are corrupt, I think many of them--outside of when they're treating trauma and infection--just don't know what they're doing. A few years ago, I had an online conversation with a doctor (an MD, not a doctor of funk) with a subspecialty in diabetes who recommended her American patients eat at least 130g (or so) of carb per day because the American Diabetes Association said so. But of course, she did her research as well: she

"I am not a role model." -Charles Barkley  Possibly the wisest words any celebrity ever said: And so it is with all entertainers flogging drugs, diet and fitness programs: they aren't paid to actually know how any of these work. An entertainer may not know any more than you do about diabetes, losing weight or getting in shape. What these entertainers have that you might not is stage training, the gift of gab, and a contract to shill for a drug company, weight loss program, or food manufacturer. I'm not accusing anyone of lying, but do you really think someone like Paula Deen, as spokeswoman for Novo Nordisk , is going to tell you how to keep your blood sugars under control without drugs? (Novo Nordisk is a major insulin manufacturer and sponsors flawed research supposedly showing that low-carb diets aren't any more effective than high-carb diets for controlling diabetes. See this .) Are some doctors paid shills, too? Oh yes. In fairness, a lot of p

Pity the proponents of high-carb diets and calorie restriction. They've had the roughest week since Denise Minger dismantled the China Study. First, Jimmy Moore of the Livin' la Vida Low Carb blog dropped the bombshel l that a member of the 2010 Dietary Guidelines Committee (U.S.) publicly stated that there was no scientific basis for the U.S. dietary guidelines. Excerpt below--see Jimmy's blog for the whole jaw-dropping scoop. Joanne Slavin, PhD, RD, professor of Food Science and Nutrition at the University of Minnesota, was the head of the Carbohydrate Committee and on the Protein sub-committee for the 2010 Dietary Guidelines Scientific Advisory Committee. She was invited to be one of the guest speakers at The 9th Conference on Preventative Nutrition in Tel Aviv, Israel on May 18, 2011. Perhaps Ms. Slavin felt more at liberty to express her true feelings about the final version of the 2010 Dietary Guidelines being overseas and didn’t realize that I’d have eyes and ears l