Diabities and Sugar

This article was put on the message board of a Psychic Chatsite i am joint manager by one of our American Assistant Managers, as a few of our members suffer with Diabities.
Babs

Having diabetes used to mean a lifetime of meals that lacked the most pleasant aspect of taste: sweetness. Today, the rules for avoiding sugar have been relaxed. New low calorie sweeteners can give you sweetness that tastes as good as sugar, without the extra calories. As a result, people with diabetes today can eat meals that are well-rounded in tastes, as well as in nutrition.

The Sweet Life

Table sugar (sucrose) used to be seen as unhealthy for people with diabetes. Doctors and dietitians assumed that table sugar was more quickly digested and absorbed into the blood than starches, like potatoes and breads. They thought that table sugar would cause a larger rise in blood glucose.

They were wrong. More than a dozen studies have shown that sugars in foods don't spike blood glucose any higher or faster than starches. The American Diabetes Association has changed its nutritional recommendations to say, "scientific evidence has shown that the use of sucrose as part of the meal plan does not impair blood glucose control in individuals with type 1 or type 2 diabetes."

The picky guidelines that told you exactly how many teaspoons of sugar you could eat per week have been dropped. However, one important rule remains: you need to work sugar into the meal plan that you have set up with your dietitian. Sugar is not a "free food." It counts as a carbohydrate. When you choose to eat foods that contain sugar, you need to substitute them for carbohydrate foods in your meal plan.

What is a sugary food? The Nutrition Facts labels on almost all packaged foods will tell you how many grams of sugar are in a serving of that food, as well as how many grams of total carbohydrate. Your registered dietitian can help you read the new food label. He or she will also do a nutrition assessment to tell you how much carbohydrate to eat at each meal.

The Aftertaste

The new recommendations are good news. But there are still reasons to limit the amount of sugar you eat. Sugary foods are often foods without much nutrition. They have calories, but lack the vitamins, minerals, and fiber that are important to your health. Foods made with a lot of sugar are often also high in fat. Look at the exchange values for foods such as ice cream, cake, and chocolate. One-half cup of ice cream equals one (1) starch and two (2) fat exchanges. Eating too many high-fat foods puts you at risk for heart and blood vessel disease.

Remember that different people have different responses to food. It's a good idea to check your blood glucose after you eat a sugary food. You may be able to eat a serving of a food with sugar without much change in your blood glucose levels. Or you may find that your blood glucose level shoots up and you need to use care when eating sugary foods. If you take insulin, your dietitian may be able to teach you how to increase your dose when you plan to eat something with sugar or extra carbohydrate.

a.k.a. Sugar

There are many types of sugars in nature. You should be aware that the Nutrition Facts label groups all types of sugar together under the category "sugars." Regular table sugar is called sucrose. You can recognize some other sugars on labels because their chemical names also end in "-ose." These include glucose (also called dextrose), fructose (also called levulose), lactose, and maltose. Other kinds of carbohydrates are sugar alcohols: sorbitol, xylitol, and mannitol.

Fructose and the sugar alcohols may have a smaller effect on your blood glucose levels than sucrose or other carbohydrates. These sweeteners are fine to use in moderate amounts. But there is no reason to use large amounts of fructose or sugar alcohols in place of sucrose. Large amounts of fructose may increase blood fat levels.

Sucrose is known by several names, depending on its form and how it was processed. Molasses, beet sugar, brown sugar, cane sugar, confectioner's sugar, powdered sugar, raw sugar, turbinado, maple syrup -- all are basically table sugar and have similar effects on blood glucose.

Other natural and processed foods are very high in sugars. These foods include carob powder, corn syrup, sugar cane syrup, honey, sweetened condensed milk, and chocolate.

Low Calorie Sweeteners

Don't throw away your low calorie sweeteners just because sugar is safer than you thought. Low calorie sweeteners are "free foods." They make food taste sweet, and have no calories and do not raise blood glucose levels. They do not count as a carbohydrate, a fat, or any other exchange. They can be added to your meal plan instead of substituted.

The Food & Drug Administration (FDA) has approved the use of these low calorie sweeteners. The American Diabetes Association accepts the FDA's conclusion that these sweeteners are safe.

Saccharin Saccharin can be used in both hot and cold foods to make them sweeter. As you may know, large amounts of saccharin have caused cancer in laboratory animals, such as rats. Rats are often good models for humans, but in the case of saccharin, they appear not to be. Evidence from studies done on people suggests that saccharin does not cause cancer in humans.

Aspartame Aspartame (NutraSweet) is another low calorie sweetener. You need to use only a tiny amount to sweeten food.

People who have the rare disease phenylketonuria (PKU) know not eat or drink anything with phenylalanine. Because aspartame-containing products have phenylalanine, those products carry the labeling "Phenylketonurics: Contains Phenylalanine."

Because high temperatures can decrease its sweetness, check the manufacturer's Web site or call their toll-free number for guidelines when using aspartame in recipes.

Acesulfame potassium Another low calorie sweetener on the market is acesulfame potassium (Sweet One), also called acesulfame-K. This sweetener can be used in all baking and cooking. In some cases the texture of baked goods is not the same with acesulfame-K as with sugar. To improve the texture, you might need to add some sugar. Again, follow the manufacturer's guidelines for the best results.

Sucralose Sucralose (SPLENDA) is the newest low calorie sweetener on the market. Sucralose can be used anywhere sugar can be used, such as in beverages, baked goods, and processed foods. Like other low calorie sweeteners, you may need to add some sugar to recipes to improve texture. All of these low calorie sweeteners may help people who have diabetes or are overweight reduce calories and stick to a healthy meal plan. In addition, these sweeteners are useful for reducing calories and carbohydrates when used instead of sugar in coffee, tea, cereal, and on fruit.

For Dessert

Whether you choose to eat foods with sugar, low calorie sweeteners, both, or neither, there are four helpful hints to a sweeter life with diabetes.

1. Work with a registered dietitian to develop a meal plan unique for you. A nutritional assessment will help you learn how much carbohydrate at meals and snacks keeps your blood glucose in your target range.

2. Limit saturated fats, which often go hand-in-hand with sugar in some sweet foods.

3. Learn to read the Nutrition Facts on food labels to know how much fat, protein, and carbohydrate you're getting.

4. Eat a variety of fruits, vegetables, low-fat dairy products and whole grain foods each day.

Babs

In my mind this is pure popular market led drivel. Especially advocating the use of aspartame with diabetes, Got to www.msgtruth.com and see the link between diabetes and aspartame. It also has one for AF and MSG. Heated aspartame is more than toxic it turns to poison and starts breaking down to formaldahyde and ethanol. Hence why you should never leave you diet cola in the sun or over certain temperatures.

Never mind the sugar aspect they also advocate low fat. Now what is to stunt the insulin surge if all the fat in the diet is cut.

The only good diabetes eating plan is a paleo diet.

Fran

Fran

I shall tell them i know about Asparatam as i had an article from a friend ages ago saying how bad it is for anyone to take...... I for one don't like Diet drinks as it is or anything with the word suger free.

Babs

I view this as a ploy to keep diabetics from healing themselves with low carb diets....after all if this happened, it would put the medical people out of a job to treat diabetes.

Chemical sweeteners are dangerous. All forms of sugar contribute to insulin resistance which is the critical issue in developing diabetes.

Stevia is a plant-derived sweetener which is safe for everyone.

There is a whole web site devoted to aspartame, the dangers and the nightmares people have suffered because of this chemical.

Splenda is another chemically derived sweetener touted as natural and safe and it is produced with the use of chlorine...a known carcinogen.

The whole thing diabetics need to do is get over the sugar craving by kicking the habit with low glycemic foods and plenty of protein.

These other suggestions in this article just enable diabetics to remain sick.

I want diabetics to learn how to get healthy and stay that way.

Jackie

Jackie:

>>The whole thing diabetics need to do is get over the sugar craving by kicking the habit with low glycemic foods...

Oh... that's quite easy...munching some raw beets, while people around you enjoy their chocolates, cookies, cakes, icecreams and the like. It's just a matter of habit changing - no big deal..

Happy 2004, Gert.

I shall duly post these message on my friends message board so they can make their own minds up.

Thank you all, just needed confirmation.......i know certain sugars are wrong for Diabetics....and for non diabetics as i told one of my other friends who happened to metion it to a friend of hers...she stopped using anything with Aspartame in and had no more joint pains.


Babs

Gert -

It is not an easy thing for diabetics to get into the right frame of mind to overcome sugar craving....but once they are in it and feel so good and see the results, watching others do damage to themselves with inappropriate and unhealthy foods is not such a burden or a penalty....if they are truly serious about regaining health.

The healthy mindset is the challenge.

Once a person eliminates the sugar and high carbs from their diet and drinks lots and lots of water, the craving goes away. Truly, it does...even if one is not diabetic.

Jackie

Here Babs

Psot them this one from Dr Mercolas web site

[www.mercola.com]

What If It's All Been a Big Fat Lie?


By Gary Taubes

Eat less fat and more carbohydrates may be the cause of the rampaging epidemic of obesity in America.

When Atkins first published his ''Diet Revolution'' in 1972, Americans were just coming to terms with the proposition that fat -- particularly the saturated fat of meat and dairy products -- was the primary nutritional evil in the American diet.

Atkins managed to sell millions of copies of a book promising that we would lose weight eating steak, eggs and butter to our heart's desire, because it was the carbohydrates, the pasta, rice, bagels and sugar, that caused obesity and even heart disease. Fat, he said, was harmless.

Atkins allowed his readers to eat ''truly luxurious foods without limit,'' as he put it, ''lobster with butter sauce, steak with bearnaise sauce . . . bacon cheeseburgers,'' but allowed no starches or refined carbohydrates, which means no sugars or anything made from flour. Atkins banned even fruit juices, and permitted only a modicum of vegetables, although the latter were negotiable as the diet progressed.

Atkins was by no means the first to get rich pushing a high-fat diet that restricted carbohydrates, but he popularized it to an extent that the American Medical Association considered it a potential threat to our health. The A.M.A. attacked Atkins's diet as a ''bizarre regimen'' that advocated ''an unlimited intake of saturated fats and cholesterol-rich foods,'' and Atkins even had to defend his diet in Congressional hearings.

Thirty years later, America has become weirdly polarized on the subject of weight. On the one hand, we've been told with almost religious certainty by everyone from the surgeon general on down, and we have come to believe with almost religious certainty, that obesity is caused by the excessive consumption of fat, and that if we eat less fat we will lose weight and live longer.

On the other, we have the ever-resilient message of Atkins and decades' worth of best-selling diet books, including ''The Zone,'' ''Sugar Busters'' and ''Protein Power'' to name a few. All push some variation of what scientists would call the alternative hypothesis: it's not the fat that makes us fat, but the carbohydrates, and if we eat less carbohydrates we will lose weight and live longer.

The perversity of this alternative hypothesis is that it identifies the cause of obesity as precisely those refined carbohydrates at the base of the famous Food Guide Pyramid -- the pasta, rice and bread -- that we are told should be the staple of our healthy low-fat diet, and then on the sugar or corn syrup in the soft drinks, fruit juices and sports drinks that we have taken to consuming in quantity if for no other reason than that they are fat free and so appear intrinsically healthy.

While the low-fat-is-good-health dogma represents reality as we have come to know it, and the government has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in research trying to prove its worth, the low-carbohydrate message has been relegated to the realm of unscientific fantasy.

Over the past five years, however, there has been a subtle shift in the scientific consensus. It used to be that even considering the possibility of the alternative hypothesis, let alone researching it, was tantamount to quackery by association.

Now a small but growing minority of establishment researchers have come to take seriously what the low-carb-diet doctors have been saying all along. Walter Willett, chairman of the department of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health, may be the most visible proponent of testing this heretic hypothesis. Willett is the de facto spokesman of the longest-running, most comprehensive diet and health studies ever performed, which have already cost upward of $100 million and include data on nearly 300,000 individuals.

Those data, says Willett, clearly contradict the low-fat-is-good-health message ''and the idea that all fat is bad for you; the exclusive focus on adverse effects of fat may have contributed to the obesity epidemic.''

These researchers point out that there are plenty of reasons to suggest that the low-fat-is-good-health hypothesis has now effectively failed the test of time. In particular, that we are in the midst of an obesity epidemic that started around the early 1980's, and that this was coincident with the rise of the low-fat dogma.

They say that low-fat weight-loss diets have proved in clinical trials and real life to be dismal failures, and that on top of it all, the percentage of fat in the American diet has been decreasing for two decades. Our cholesterol levels have been declining, and we have been smoking less, and yet the incidence of heart disease has not declined as would be expected. ''That is very disconcerting,'' Willett says. ''It suggests that something else bad is happening.''

The science behind the alternative hypothesis can be called Endocrinology 101, which is how it's referred to by David Ludwig, a researcher at Harvard Medical School who runs the pediatric obesity clinic at Children's Hospital Boston, and who prescribes his own version of a carbohydrate-restricted diet to his patients.

Endocrinology 101 requires an understanding of how carbohydrates affect insulin and blood sugar and in turn fat metabolism and appetite. This is basic endocrinology, Ludwig says, which is the study of hormones, and it is still considered radical because the low-fat dietary wisdom emerged in the 1960's from researchers almost exclusively concerned with the effect of fat on cholesterol and heart disease.

At the time, Endocrinology 101 was still underdeveloped, and so it was ignored. Now that this science is becoming clear, it has to fight a quarter century of anti-fat prejudice.

The alternative hypothesis also comes with an implication that is worth considering for a moment, because it's a whopper, and it may indeed be an obstacle to its acceptance.

If the alternative hypothesis is right -- still a big ''if'' -- then it strongly suggests that the ongoing epidemic of obesity in America and elsewhere is not, as we are constantly told, due simply to a collective lack of will power and a failure to exercise.

Rather it occurred, as Atkins has been saying (along with Barry Sears, author of ''The Zone''), because the public health authorities told us unwittingly, but with the best of intentions, to eat precisely those foods that would make us fat, and we did. We ate more fat-free carbohydrates, which, in turn, made us hungrier and then heavier.

Put simply, if the alternative hypothesis is right, then a low-fat diet is not by definition a healthy diet. In practice, such a diet cannot help being high in carbohydrates, and that can lead to obesity, and perhaps even heart disease.

''For a large percentage of the population, perhaps 30 to 40 percent, low-fat diets are counterproductive,'' says Eleftheria Maratos-Flier, director of obesity research at Harvard's prestigious Joslin Diabetes Center. ''They have the paradoxical effect of making people gain weight.''

Scientists are still arguing about fat, despite a century of research, because the regulation of appetite and weight in the human body happens to be almost inconceivably complex, and the experimental tools we have to study it are still remarkably inadequate. This combination leaves researchers in an awkward position. To study the entire physiological system involves feeding real food to real human subjects for months or years on end, which is prohibitively expensive, ethically questionable (if you're trying to measure the effects of foods that might cause heart disease) and virtually impossible to do in any kind of rigorously controlled scientific manner.

But if researchers seek to study something less costly and more controllable, they end up studying experimental situations so oversimplified that their results may have nothing to do with reality.

This then leads to a research literature so vast that it's possible to find at least some published research to support virtually any theory. The result is a balkanized community -- ''splintered, very opinionated and in many instances, intransigent,'' says Kurt Isselbacher, a former chairman of the Food and Nutrition Board of the National Academy of Science -- in which researchers seem easily convinced that their preconceived notions are correct and thoroughly uninterested in testing any other hypotheses but their own.

What's more, the number of misconceptions propagated about the most basic research can be staggering.

Researchers will be suitably scientific describing the limitations of their own experiments, and then will cite something as gospel truth because they read it in a magazine. The classic example is the statement heard repeatedly that 95 percent of all dieters never lose weight, and 95 percent of those who do will not keep it off.

This will be correctly attributed to the University of Pennsylvania psychiatrist Albert Stunkard, but it will go unmentioned that this statement is based on 100 patients who passed through Stunkard's obesity clinic during the Eisenhower administration.

With these caveats, one of the few reasonably reliable facts about the obesity epidemic is that it started around the early 1980's. According to Katherine Flegal, an epidemiologist at the National Center for Health Statistics, the percentage of obese Americans stayed relatively constant through the 1960's and 1970's at 13 percent to 14 percent and then shot up by 8 percentage points in the 1980's. By the end of that decade, nearly one in four Americans was obese.

That steep rise, which is consistent through all segments of American society and which continued unabated through the 1990's, is the singular feature of the epidemic. Any theory that tries to explain obesity in America has to account for that. Meanwhile, overweight children nearly tripled in number. And for the first time, physicians began diagnosing Type 2 diabetes in adolescents. Type 2 diabetes often accompanies obesity. It used to be called adult-onset diabetes and now, for the obvious reason, is not.

So How Did This Happen?

The orthodox and ubiquitous explanation is that we live in what Kelly Brownell, a Yale psychologist, has called a ''toxic food environment'' of cheap fatty food, large portions, pervasive food advertising and sedentary lives. By this theory, we are at the Pavlovian mercy of the food industry, which spends nearly $10 billion a year advertising unwholesome junk food and fast food.

And because these foods, especially fast food, are so filled with fat, they are both irresistible and uniquely fattening. On top of this, so the theory goes, our modern society has successfully eliminated physical activity from our daily lives. We no longer exercise or walk up stairs, nor do our children bike to school or play outside, because they would prefer to play video games and watch television.

And because some of us are obviously predisposed to gain weight while others are not, this explanation also has a genetic component -- the thrifty gene. It suggests that storing extra calories as fat was an evolutionary advantage to our Paleolithic ancestors, who had to survive frequent famine. We then inherited these ''thrifty'' genes, despite their liability in today's toxic environment.

This theory makes perfect sense and plays to our puritanical prejudice that fat, fast food and television are innately damaging to our humanity. But there are two catches. First, to buy this logic is to accept that the copious negative reinforcement that accompanies obesity -- both socially and physically -- is easily overcome by the constant bombardment of food advertising and the lure of a supersize bargain meal.

And second, as Flegal points out, little data exist to support any of this. Certainly none of it explains what changed so significantly to start the epidemic. Fast-food consumption, for example, continued to grow steadily through the 70's and 80's, but it did not take a sudden leap, as obesity did.

As far as exercise and physical activity go, there are no reliable data before the mid-80's, according to William Dietz, who runs the division of nutrition and physical activity at the Centers for Disease Control; the 1990's data show obesity rates continuing to climb, while exercise activity remained unchanged. This suggests the two have little in common.

Dietz also acknowledged that a culture of physical exercise began in the United States in the 70's -- the ''leisure exercise mania,'' as Robert Levy, director of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, described it in 1981 -- and has continued through the present day.

As for the thrifty gene, it provides the kind of evolutionary rationale for human behavior that scientists find comforting but that simply cannot be tested. In other words, if we were living through an anorexia epidemic, the experts would be discussing the equally untestable ''spendthrift gene'' theory, touting evolutionary advantages of losing weight effortlessly. An overweight homo erectus, they'd say, would have been easy prey for predators.

It is also undeniable, note students of Endocrinology 101, that mankind never evolved to eat a diet high in starches or sugars.

''Grain products and concentrated sugars were essentially absent from human nutrition until the invention of agriculture, was only 10,000 years ago.''

This is discussed frequently in the anthropology texts but is mostly absent from the obesity literature, with the prominent exception of the low-carbohydrate-diet books.

What's forgotten in the current controversy is that the low-fat dogma itself is only about 25 years old. Until the late 70's, the accepted wisdom was that fat and protein protected against overeating by making you sated, and that carbohydrates made you fat.

In ''The Physiology of Taste,'' for instance, an 1825 discourse considered among the most famous books ever written about food, the French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin says that he could easily identify the causes of obesity after 30 years of listening to one ''stout party'' after another proclaiming the joys of bread, rice and (from a ''particularly stout party'') potatoes.

Brillat-Savarin described the roots of obesity as a natural predisposition conjuncted with the ''floury and feculent substances which man makes the prime ingredients of his daily nourishment.'' He added that the effects of this fecula -- i.e., ''potatoes, grain or any kind of flour'' -- were seen sooner when sugar was added to the diet.

This is what my mother taught me 40 years ago, backed up by the vague observation that Italians tended toward corpulence because they ate so much pasta. This observation was actually documented by Ancel Keys, a University of Minnesota physician who noted that fats ''have good staying power,'' by which he meant they are slow to be digested and so lead to satiation, and that Italians were among the heaviest populations he had studied.

According to Keys, the Neapolitans, for instance, ate only a little lean meat once or twice a week, but ate bread and pasta every day for lunch and dinner. ''There was no evidence of nutritional deficiency,'' he wrote, ''but the working-class women were fat.''

By the 70's, you could still find articles in the journals describing high rates of obesity in Africa and the Caribbean where diets contained almost exclusively carbohydrates. The common thinking, wrote a former director of the Nutrition Division of the United Nations, was that the ideal diet, one that prevented obesity, snacking and excessive sugar consumption, was a diet ''with plenty of eggs, beef, mutton, chicken, butter and well-cooked vegetables.'' This was the identical prescription Brillat-Savarin put forth in 1825.

It was Ancel Keys, paradoxically, who introduced the low-fat-is-good-health dogma in the 50's with his theory that dietary fat raises cholesterol levels and gives you heart disease. Over the next two decades, however, the scientific evidence supporting this theory remained stubbornly ambiguous.

The case was eventually settled not by new science but by politics. It began in January 1977, when a Senate committee led by George McGovern published its ''Dietary Goals for the United States,'' advising that Americans significantly curb their fat intake to abate an epidemic of ''killer diseases'' supposedly sweeping the country.

It peaked in late 1984, when the National Institutes of Health officially recommended that all Americans over the age of 2 eat less fat. By that time, fat had become ''this greasy killer'' in the memorable words of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, and the model American breakfast of eggs and bacon was well on its way to becoming a bowl of Special K with low-fat milk, a glass of orange juice and toast, hold the butter -- a dubious feast of refined carbohydrates.

In the intervening years, the N.I.H. spent several hundred million dollars trying to demonstrate a connection between eating fat and getting heart disease and, despite what we might think, it failed. Five major studies revealed no such link. A sixth, however, costing well over $100 million alone, concluded that reducing cholesterol by drug therapy could prevent heart disease. The N.I.H. administrators then made a leap of faith.

Basil Rifkind, who oversaw the relevant trials for the N.I.H., described their logic this way: they had failed to demonstrate at great expense that eating less fat had any health benefits. But if a cholesterol-lowering drug could prevent heart attacks, then a low-fat, cholesterol-lowering diet should do the same. ''It's an imperfect world,'' Rifkind told me. ''The data that would be definitive is ungettable, so you do your best with what is available.''

Some of the best scientists disagreed with this low-fat logic, suggesting that good science was incompatible with such leaps of faith, but they were effectively ignored.

Pete Ahrens, whose Rockefeller University laboratory had done the seminal research on cholesterol metabolism, testified to McGovern's committee that everyone responds differently to low-fat diets. It was not a scientific matter who might benefit and who might be harmed, he said, but ''a betting matter.'' Phil Handler, then president of the National Academy of Sciences, testified in Congress to the same effect in 1980.

''What right,'' Handler asked, ''has the federal government to propose that the American people conduct a vast nutritional experiment, with themselves as subjects, on the strength of so very little evidence that it will do them any good?''

Nonetheless, once the N.I.H. signed off on the low-fat doctrine, societal forces took over. The food industry quickly began producing thousands of reduced-fat food products to meet the new recommendations. Fat was removed from foods like cookies, chips and yogurt. The problem was, it had to be replaced with something as tasty and pleasurable to the palate, which meant some form of sugar, often high-fructose corn syrup.

Meanwhile, an entire industry emerged to create fat substitutes, of which Procter & Gamble's olestra was first. And because these reduced-fat meats, cheeses, snacks and cookies had to compete with a few hundred thousand other food products marketed in America, the industry dedicated considerable advertising effort to reinforcing the less-fat-is-good-health message.

Helping the cause was what Walter Willett calls the ''huge forces'' of dietitians, health organizations, consumer groups, health reporters and even cookbook writers, all well-intended missionaries of healthful eating.

Few experts now deny that the low-fat message is radically oversimplified. If nothing else, it effectively ignores the fact that unsaturated fats, like olive oil, are relatively good for you: they tend to elevate your good cholesterol, high-density lipoprotein (H.D.L.), and lower your bad cholesterol, low-density lipoprotein (L.D.L.), at least in comparison to the effect of carbohydrates. While higher L.D.L. raises your heart-disease risk, higher H.D.L. reduces it.

What this means is that even saturated fats - a.k.a., the bad fats -- are not nearly as deleterious as you would think. True, they will elevate your bad cholesterol, but they will also elevate your good cholesterol. In other words, it's a virtual wash. As Willett explained to me, you will gain little to no health benefit by giving up milk, butter and cheese and eating bagels instead.

New York Times July 7, 2002

Continued in the next issue of the newsletter


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DR. MERCOLA'S COMMENT:

It is encouraging to see major media like The New York Times starting to question the "truths" that the medical establishment has purchased with billions of dollars of public relations money and pushed on society for years -- at a horribly high cost to all of us.

Books like Dr. Atkins' and Websites like mine, based on research and information uninfluenced by corporate America's PR machine, gain such popularity for a good reason: most people aren't stupid, and while they don't have the specific expertise to sift through the facts, they have a strong suspicion the medical establishment does not exactly have their best interests in mind.

In my Eating Plan I stress replacing nearly all carbohydrate-crammed grain foods with green vegetables, eliminating sugar-rich beverages, and increasing intake of the healthy fat found in fish oil, Omega-3, among other advice for healthy living. And I have always believed in eating meat in healthy moderation, though, more recently, I have particularly advocated meats higher in Omega-3 and lower in Omega-6 fats.

The high-grain diet fed to mass-market livestock may fatten them up quickly, leading to quicker and fatter profits for the producers, but it results in meat high in the unhealthy Omega-6, leading to some of the same problems you’d face consuming the high grain diet yourself. Wild game, free-range poultry, and grass-fed beef are much better meat options, as they are raised on a natural diet producing a healthier source of protein to balance your vegetable-based diet.


For those who have read this newsletter awhile, this can go without saying, but once again -- as some of the tenets of my Eating Plan above suggest in relation to the New York Times article -- we were years ahead of the mass media.

Jackie,

Agreed. The healthy mindset is the challenge. And it remains - for the rest of your life, living in a (western) world build of sugar and high carbs. B.t.w. I'm just an "ordinary" afibber not diabetic, but my wife is and could tell a lot about that challenge (-> xmas...)

Gert (appreciating your contributions)

I'm Type II diabetic. I eat only fresh vegetables either light steamed to raw. Only cold water fish either baked, broiled or grilled. Nothing smoked! Smoked foods contain carcinogens that cause cancer! We eat no beef, pork, or poultry with the exception of turkey occassionally. Turkey meat contains anions (negative charges) which is good for you. Turkey also contains TRYPTOPHAN that is good for you. Only the freshest fruits available. Wash all fruits and vegetables with vegetable wash if you can find it, if not use liquid dishwashing detergent as it contains no fillers like powdered detergents. Eat a balanced meal of vegetables. Eat nothing with MSG, Aspartame, or any other artificial sweetener. Don't

Don't count calories, you need them for energy! You do not have to worry about too many calories consummed from eating fresh vegetables and fruits, they supply anions and these disperse red blood cells and that makes your blood flow into the tiny capillaries to carry nourishment and oxygen to every cell.

You will lose weight down to where you should weigh if you eat correctly!

You can eat all you want of this kind of food and not have to worry about gaining weight.

I used to take GLUCOPHAGE for controlling Type II diabetes.

Eating right requires no medications or even Alpha Lopoic Acid for controlling Type II diabetes.

Notice I have only addressed TYPE II DIABETES, not the other kind.

Regards,
Glenn

Glenn - That's a beautiful testimonial.

Are you able to be off the Glucophage completely?


I know what you say to be true - I've seen other Type II diabetics do the same.

You are to be congratulated. Good job. Nice reward for your efforts were huge.

Best in 2004,
Jackie